High-level construal mindset promotes categorizing information based on thematic associate relations

• Published in: Memory & cognition 2024-08
• Main Authors: Shi, Kai, Li, Jiansheng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/s13421-024-01624-6

The present study examined whether a high-level construal mindset promotes categorizing information according to thematic relations. In three experiments, the construal-level priming task was used to initiate a high-level versus low-level construal mindset, and then all participants were asked to complete the triad task, which is a task measuring the preference to classify. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 have shown that regardless of whether it was a set of artificially produced objects (Experiment 1) or a set of natural objects (Experiment 2), the high-level construal mindset group exhibited a higher proportion of thematic responses in the triad task. Experiment 3 transformed the stimulus set of the triad task into a set that consisted of many, larger, published, and controlled/optimized stimuli. The results of the experiment still showed that the high-level construal mindset group exhibited a higher proportion of thematic responses in the triad task. The findings suggest that a high-level construal mindset promotes categorizing information based on thematic relations.