Exploring the boundary conditions of unconscious numerical priming effects with continuous flash suppression

Hesselmann, Guido; Darcy, Natasha; Sterzer, Philipp; Knops, André

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.10.009

Cited by 35 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 52 publications

(75 reference statements)

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“…Our arguments against unconscious sentence processing may well be rather deflationary, but they are also consistent with a growing body of work that has questioned the reliability and interpretation of studies of unconscious high level cognition (Hesselmann, Darcy, Sterzer, Knops, 2015;Hesselmann & Knops, 2014;Moors, Boelens, van Overwalle, & Wagemans, 2016;Newell & Shanks, 2014;Shanks, 2016;Vadillo et al, 2016), and specifically of Hassin's (2013) proposed "Yes It Can" principle (Hesselmann & Moors, 2015). Given this, we suggest that there is currently no strong reason to believe that syntactic and combinatorial semantic processing can occur without awareness.…”

Section: The Potential For False Positives In the Breaking Cfs Paradigmsupporting

confidence: 55%

The importance of awareness for understanding language

Rabagliati¹,

Robertson²,

Carmel³

2016

Preprint

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Is consciousness required for high level cognitive processes, or can the unconscious mind perform tasks that are as complex and difficult as, for example, understanding a sentence? Recent work has argued that, yes, the unconscious mind can: Sklar et al. (2012) found that sentences, masked from consciousness using the technique of continuous flash suppression (CFS), broke into awareness more rapidly when their meanings were more unusual or more emotionally negative, even though processing the sentences’ meaning required unconsciously combining each word’s meaning. This has motivated the important claim that consciousness plays little-to-no functional role in high-level cognitive operations. Here, we aimed to replicate and extend these findings, but instead, across 10 high-powered studies, we found no evidence that the meaning of a phrase or word could be understood without awareness. We did, however, consistently find evidence that low-level perceptual features, such as sentence length and familiarity of alphabet, could be processed unconsciously. Our null findings for sentence processing are corroborated by a meta-analysis that aggregates our studies with the prior literature. We offer a potential explanation for prior positive results through a set of computational simulations, which show how the distributional characteristics of this type of CFS data, in particular its skew and heavy tail, can cause an elevated level of false positive results when common data exclusion criteria are applied. Our findings thus have practical implication for analyzing such data. More importantly, they suggest that consciousness may well be required for high-level cognitive tasks such as understanding language.

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Section: The Potential For False Positives In the Breaking Cfs Paradigmsupporting

confidence: 55%

The importance of awareness for understanding language

Rabagliati¹,

Robertson²,

Carmel³

2016

Preprint

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“…Along another dimension, the available paradigms may be placed within a functional hierarchy of unconscious processing, according to the extent to which features of visual stimuli are processed on an unconscious level and still induce effects on behaviour, e.g., in priming experiments (Breitmeyer, 2015). The results of our reanalysis can be framed into an emerging series of results that indicate that unconscious processing associated with CFS is not as high-level as previously thought (Hedger, Adams, & Garner, 2015;Hesselmann, Darcy, Sterzer, & Knops, 2015;Hesselmann & Knops, 2014;Moors, Boelens, et al, 2016) and that neural activity related to stimuli suppressed by CFS is considerably reduced already in early visual areas (Fogelson, Kohler, Miller, Granger, & Tse, 2014;Yuval-Greenberg & Heeger, 2013). Importantly, building such a functional hierarchy should eventually allow to formulate predictions on the level of unconscious processing that can be expected in a specific experimental setup.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

A critical reexamination of doing arithmetic nonconsciously

Moors

Hesselmann

2017

Psychon Bull Rev

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A recent study claimed to have obtained evidence that participants can solve invisible multistep arithmetic equations (Sklar et al., 2012). The authors used a priming paradigm in which reaction times to targets congruent with the equation's solution were responded to faster compared with incongruent ones. We critically reanalyzed the data set of Sklar et al. and show that the claims being made in the article are not fully supported by the alternative analyses that we applied. A Bayesian reanalysis of the data accounting for the random variability of the target stimuli in addition to the subjects shows that the evidence for priming effects is less strong than initially claimed. That is, although Bayes factors revealed evidence for the presence of a priming effect, it was generally weak. Second, the claim that unconscious arithmetic occurs for subtraction but not for addition is not supported when the critical interaction is tested. Third, the data do not show well-established features of numerosity priming as derived from V-shaped response time curves for prime-target distances. Fourth, we show that it is impossible to classify reaction times as resulting from congruent or incongruent primetarget relationships, which should be expected if their results imply that participants genuinely solve the equations on each trial. We conclude that the claims being made in the original article are not fully supported by the analyses that we apply. Together with a recent failure to replicate the original results and a critique of the analysis based on regression to the mean, we argue that the current evidence for unconscious arithmetic is inconclusive. We argue that strong claims require strong evidence and stress that cumulative research strategies are needed to provide such evidence.

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“…Additionally, it was shown in a series of follow-up experiments with non-symbolic primes and targets (Hesselmann, Darcy, Sterzer, & Knops, 2015) that after the exclusion of potential target numerosity confounds at the level of experimental design, the distance-dependent numerosity priming effect did not appear. Instead, an identity priming effect was found, thus providing no conclusive evidence for high-level distance-dependent numerical priming under CFS.…”

Section: Number Processingmentioning

confidence: 97%