Discrimination without Awareness?

Abstract

The fate of the unattended message in dichotic listening experiments is a much disputed issue. Moray (1969) proposes that there is no processing of the unattended message, whereas Norman (1969) has suggested that it is analyzed to the level of meaning. In order to test these alternative hypotheses an experiment was performed in which galvanic skin responses (GSR) were conditioned to a word (CS) by pairing it with shock. The word was then included in passages of prose presented to subjects as the attended and unattended messages in a dichotic listening task. GSR's were obtained to the occurrence of CS in the unattended message and also to words acoustically similar to CS and to synonyms of CS. The probability of obtaining a GSR to the occurrence of an accoustically similar word was increased by placing that word in a context appropriate to CS. These results suggest that the unattended message can be processed to a level at which semantic information is extracted without the subject's reported awareness.

The role of attentional resources in automatic detection

“…This is supported by the finding that when the subject is searching for a previously conditioned word, a GSR is evoked even on trials when the subject fails to detect its presence (Corteen and Dunn, 1974). The general finding of these studies is that although conditioned words in a "nonattended" message evoke GSR's, the magnitude of the GSR is less than when the word appears in the "attended" message (Forster and Govier, 1978;Von Wright, Anderson, and Stenman, 1975). These results once again implicate the role of attention in the degree of activation of memory nodes produced by the initial encoding process.…”

Levels‐of‐Processing Effects in Infant Memory?

“…Unattended words, for example, affect the perceived meaning of an attended word in the visual field (Bradshaw, 1974) as well as naming latencies (Underwood, 1976). Likewise, words presented to the unattended ear in dichotic listening tasks affect the perception of words in the attended ear (Forster & Govier, 1978;Mackay, 1973).…”

Priming is not necessary for selective-attention failures: Semantic effects of unattended, unprimed letters

“…Another such effect is that subjects recognize their own names in unattended locations (Wolford & Morrison, 1980), explainable by the assumption that one's own name has a permanently high relevance. There are also identity effects of unattended letters that have previously been targets in search tasks and of unattended words that have previously been associated with electric shock (Corteen & Wood, 1972;Forster & Govier, 1978;Govier & Pitts, 1982). Both of these effects can be explained by the assumption that the training and conditioning operations produce a long-term priming of the relevant stimuli.…”