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Below is a passage from an MCAT CARS prep book. There is a question with an answer that to this day I still disagree with. Please answer the question and explain your reasoning, as I want to compare my reasoning with others'.
The palette of sights and sounds that reach the conscious mind are not neutral perceptions that people then evaluate: they come with a value already tacked onto them by the brain's processing mechanisms. Tests show that these evaluations are immediate and unconscious and applied even to things people have never encountered before, like nonsense words: "juvalamu" is intensely pleasing and "bargulum" moderately so, but "chakaka" is loathed by English speakers. These conclusions come from psychologists who have developed a test for measuring the likes and dislikes created in the moment of perceiving a word, sound, or picture. The findings, if confirmed, have possibly unsettling implications for people's ability to think and behave objectively. This is all part of preconscious processing, the mind's perception and organization of information that goes on before it reaches awareness--these judgements are lightning fast in the first moment of contact between the world and the mind.
Some scientists disagree with the claim that virtually every perception carries with it an automatic judgment, though they, too, find that such evaluations are made in many circumstances. This cohort posits a narrower scope of stimuli that elicit the response. That is, these scientists believe that people don't have automatic attitudes for everything, but rather for areas of interest.
In responding to a stimulus, a signal most likely travel first to the verbal cortex, then through white matter tracts to the amygdala, where the effect is added, and then back to the occipital lobe through the same or similar pathways. The circuitry involved can do all of this in a matter of a hundred milliseconds or so, long before the individual experiences any conscious awareness of the word. This creates an initial predisposition that gets things off on a positive or negative footing. These reactions have the power to largely determine the course of a social interaction by defining the psychological reality of the situation from the start.
Although perhaps counterintuitive, the "quick and dirty" judgment tends to be more predictive of how people actually behave than is their conscious reflection on the topic. This may represent a new, more subtle tool for research on people's attitudes, allowing scientists to assess what people feel without their having any idea of what exactly is being tested. One could detect socially sensitive attitudes people are reluctant to admit, like racial and ethnic biases, because these automatic judgments occur outside of a person's awareness, as part of an initial perception. They are trusted in the same way senses are trusted, not realizing that seemingly neutral first perceptions are already biased.
Conclusions from both camps are based on a method that allows them to detect subtle evaluations made within the first 250 milliseconds--a quarter of a second--of the perception of words. The measurement of liking can be made outside the person's awareness because if the first word is presented in less than a quarter of a second the reaction to it never registers in consciousness, though it can still be read.
The view of the cohort of scientists mentioned in paragraph 2 is most challenged in the passage by:
The palette of sights and sounds that reach the conscious mind are not neutral perceptions that people then evaluate: they come with a value already tacked onto them by the brain's processing mechanisms. Tests show that these evaluations are immediate and unconscious and applied even to things people have never encountered before, like nonsense words: "juvalamu" is intensely pleasing and "bargulum" moderately so, but "chakaka" is loathed by English speakers. These conclusions come from psychologists who have developed a test for measuring the likes and dislikes created in the moment of perceiving a word, sound, or picture. The findings, if confirmed, have possibly unsettling implications for people's ability to think and behave objectively. This is all part of preconscious processing, the mind's perception and organization of information that goes on before it reaches awareness--these judgements are lightning fast in the first moment of contact between the world and the mind.
Some scientists disagree with the claim that virtually every perception carries with it an automatic judgment, though they, too, find that such evaluations are made in many circumstances. This cohort posits a narrower scope of stimuli that elicit the response. That is, these scientists believe that people don't have automatic attitudes for everything, but rather for areas of interest.
In responding to a stimulus, a signal most likely travel first to the verbal cortex, then through white matter tracts to the amygdala, where the effect is added, and then back to the occipital lobe through the same or similar pathways. The circuitry involved can do all of this in a matter of a hundred milliseconds or so, long before the individual experiences any conscious awareness of the word. This creates an initial predisposition that gets things off on a positive or negative footing. These reactions have the power to largely determine the course of a social interaction by defining the psychological reality of the situation from the start.
Although perhaps counterintuitive, the "quick and dirty" judgment tends to be more predictive of how people actually behave than is their conscious reflection on the topic. This may represent a new, more subtle tool for research on people's attitudes, allowing scientists to assess what people feel without their having any idea of what exactly is being tested. One could detect socially sensitive attitudes people are reluctant to admit, like racial and ethnic biases, because these automatic judgments occur outside of a person's awareness, as part of an initial perception. They are trusted in the same way senses are trusted, not realizing that seemingly neutral first perceptions are already biased.
Conclusions from both camps are based on a method that allows them to detect subtle evaluations made within the first 250 milliseconds--a quarter of a second--of the perception of words. The measurement of liking can be made outside the person's awareness because if the first word is presented in less than a quarter of a second the reaction to it never registers in consciousness, though it can still be read.
The view of the cohort of scientists mentioned in paragraph 2 is most challenged in the passage by:
