This paper and the associated files describe an attempt to develop a single-task approach to studying unconscious perception. Two experiments were performed on nonassociative priming of lexical decisions with target-masked prime stimuli. The unpublished manuscript and a statement below (see the file area) have further details. This unpublished work is being made public to promote scientific transparency and possibly help the scientific community in some way.
Gary Fisk and Steve Haase
December 14, 2020
Abstract
Most studies of unconscious perception are based upon two tasks for separately assessing perception and awareness, which may create an interpretational problem. The present experiments were performed to test the possibility that lexical decision priming might show evidence of both perception and awareness in a single task. A randomly chosen word or nonword prime stimulus was briefly displayed (17 to 100 ms), then immediately followed by a randomly chosen word or nonword target for the lexical decision task (word vs. nonword discrimination). Experiment 1 nonwords had only consonant letters (no vowels – impossible nonwords), whereas Experiment 2 nonwords had consonant – vowel patterns (word-like nonwords). A response congruency effect was obtained in both experiments. Strong evidence of a processing delay caused by conscious awareness of the prime stimulus (longer overall response times) was not obtained for the long prime duration conditions. Nonassociative congruency effects may provide some methodological advantages over classical masked semantic priming, especially when the word and nonword stimuli are dissimilar.