Crosstalk between delayed and immediate subjective evaluation tasks.

Judgments and decisions based on subjective evaluation are influenced by contextual factors such as expectation and framing. However, it is not known whether parallel subjective evaluations can cause crosstalk. To investigate potential influences across subjective evaluations, the present study employed a dual-task paradigm in which an immediate rating task was embedded in a delayed choice task. For the immediate rating, the participants performed moral evaluations on images of real-world scenes in Experiment 1 and appetitive evaluations on food images in Experiment 2. For the delayed choice, the participants were presented with pairs of food images or real-world scenes on a trial-by-trial basis in both experiments. In this way, we created dual tasks within and between dimensions of subjective evaluation. In addition, we systematically varied the image values, moral versus immoral and appetitive versus aversive, to examine the role of value compatibility. Within-dimension evaluations produced speeded and polarized immediate ratings. In the delayed choice, participants displayed a recency bias, preferring moral or appetitive images, but rejecting immoral or aversive images. Taken together, the pattern of results showed distinct forms of crosstalk during dual processing that highlight the vulnerability of subjective evaluation to extraneous influences, not due to framing, but to simultaneity.