Assessing autobiographical memory: the web-based autobiographical Implicit Association Test

Abstract

By assessing the association strength with TRUE and FALSE, the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) [Sartori, G., Agosta, S., Zogmaister, C., Ferrara, S. D., & Castiello, U. (2008). How to accurately detect autobiographical events. Psychological Science, 19, 772–780. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02156.x] aims to determine which of two contrasting statements is true. To efficiently run well-powered aIAT experiments, we propose a web-based aIAT (web-aIAT). Experiment 1 (n = 522) is a web-based replication study of the first published aIAT study [Sartori, G., Agosta, S., Zogmaister, C., Ferrara, S. D., & Castiello, U. (2008). How to accurately detect autobiographical events. Psychological Science, 19, 772–780. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02156.x; Experiment 1]. We conclude that the replication was successful as the web-based aIAT could accurately detect which of two playing cards participants chose (AUC =.88; Hit rate = 81%). In Experiment 2 (n = 424), we investigated whether the use of affirmative versus negative sentences may partly explain the variability in aIAT accuracy findings. The aIAT could detect the chosen card when using affirmative (AUC =.90; Hit rate = 81%), but not when using negative sentences (AUC =.60; Hit rate = 53%). The web-based aIAT seems to be a valuable tool to facilitate aIAT research and may help to further identify moderators of the test’s accuracy.