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Undecided about how you will vote if there is a federal election this fall? New research suggests you may not know your own mind.

Voters make decisions at an unconscious level before they deliberate about their options, University of Western Ontario psychologist Bertram Gawronski said.

In the latest edition of the journal Science, he and two Italian researchers report on a technique that may allow pollsters one day to read the minds of undecided voters and accurately predict whom they will end up supporting.

“Our findings are promising in that we show these measures show potential for doing that,” said Dr. Gawronski, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Social Psychology.

But the technique probably will not be perfected before a Canadian federal election, which Prime Minister Stephen Harper has warned could come this fall.

“There is still work to be done,” Dr. Gawronski said.

In the Science article, he and colleagues Luciano Arcuri and Silvia Galdi at the University of Padova describe an experiment conducted in Vicenza, Italy. They interviewed 129 residents about a proposed enlargement of a U.S. military base in their community and asked if they were if favour, opposed or undecided about the expansion.

The volunteers also took a computer-based test.

For those who were undecided, the speed at which they linked pictures of the military base to positive words such as “happy” or “luck,” compared with negative words such as “awful” or “pain,” proved to be predictive of the decision they eventually made about the expansion. The test revealed what Dr. Gawronski and his colleagues call positive or negative automatic mental associations.

Other researchers, including Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, have used a similar technique to get at the subtle, ingrained biases that people are not aware of, but which may shape their behaviour.

Dr. Banaji measures latent attitudes volunteers have towards gays, people of other races and people who are fat or thin.

If, for example, someone is faster at classifying positive words like “paradise” with a picture of fat person than with a picture of someone who is thin, they have an automatic preference for people who are overweight.

*She has a website , where people can try automatic association tests, including one that will assess how Canadians feel about the United States.

Pollsters might be able to develop a similar, web-based test for people who are undecided in public opinion surveys. It could assess, for example, automatic associations people have for Mr. Harper, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton or Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe.

But more experiments have to be done in order for pollsters to be able accurately interpret the results of these kinds of tests, says Dr. Gawronski. They would need to know when a score on an automatic association test is high enough or low enough to indicate that someone has probably made up their mind, says Dr. Gawronski.

Jeff Harris, senior vice-president of public affairs at the firm Harris/ Decima says this kind of polling would be feasible.

“From our point of view any tool that might help explore these kinds of things is appealing,” he said.

About 15 per cent of participants in many polls are undecided he said. But pollsters can get at their preferences with direct questions, he says, like asking if there is a party they wouldn't support, or which way they are leaning.

Usually, the pool of undecided voters in polls breaks down in a similar way to the overall sample, he says.