Does the Brief Implicit Association Test measure semantic or affective valence representations?

Valence, the representation of a stimulus as positive or negative, is fundamental to conceptualizing attitudes and their empirical research. Valence has two potential representations: semantic and affective. The current line of studies investigates the degree to which the congruency effect of the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT), often used as an indirect evaluation measure, reflects affective or semantic aspects of valence.

The spread of affective and semantic valence representations across states.

In many decision problems, outcomes are not reached after a single action but rather after a series of events or states. To optimize decisions over multiple states, representations of how good or bad the outcomes are, that is, the outcomes' valence, should spread across states. One mechanism for valence spreading is a temporal, state-independent process in which a single valence representation is updated when an outcome is experienced and fades away afterwards.

Temporal dynamics of the semantic versus affective representations of valence during reversal learning.

Valence, the representation of a stimulus in terms of good or bad, plays a central role in models of affect, value-based learning theories, and value-based decision-making models. Previous work used Unconditioned Stimulus (US) to support a theoretical division between two different types of valence representations for a stimulus: the semantic representation of valence, i.e.