Subliminal Priming—State of the Art and Future Perspectives

Abstract

The influence of subliminal priming (behavior outside of awareness) in humans is an interesting phenomenon and its understanding is crucial as it can impact behavior, choices, and actions. Given this, research about the impact of priming continues to be an area of investigative interest, and this paper provides a technical overview of research design strengths and issues in subliminal priming research. Efficient experiments and protocols, as well as associated electroencephalographic and eye movement data analyses, are discussed in detail. We highlight the strengths and weaknesses of different priming experiments that have measured affective (emotional) and cognitive responses. Finally, very recent approaches and findings are described to summarize and emphasize state-of-the-art methods and potential future directions in research marketing and other commercial applications.

Designing Interactions Beyond Conscious Control

“…Because preconscious processes demand and utilize part of our cognitive capacities in contrast to strictly unconscious or subliminal processes, which cannot become part of subjective experience at all, we present them as a separate consciousness level in our proposed five-level model of awareness. For example, both subliminal and supraliminal priming aim to influence behaviour unconsciously [25] but supraliminal could become part of the conscious experience of the user while subliminal cannot. Similarly, the third level of awareness in the tripartite model is the metaconscious process that involves an explicit characterization of conscious mental content i.e.…”

The assessment of views on ageing: a review of self-report measures and innovative extensions

“…In contrast, linguistic and literature content analyses are much more common in sociological research traditions (Ng et al 2015 ). Moreover, other forms of psychological assessment typically used in basic research, such as reaction time tasks like implicit association tests (Greenwald et al 1998 ) or subliminal priming (Elgendi et al 2018 ) are specially thought to address phenomena on implicit and affective levels. Diary entries for the natural occurrence of ageing experiences (Miche et al 2014 b), or ecological momentary assessments (Kotter-Gruehn et al 2015 ) allow capturing intra-individual variability and systematically operationalising time references.…”

Evidence against subliminal anchoring: Two close, highly powered, preregistered, and failed replication attempts

“…Our high-powered, preregistered, close replication of Mussweiler and Englich (2005) may have been miscalibrated because the anchors were not necessarily presented subliminally. It is, however, surprising that participants recognized the anchors that were presented for 33 ms because the exposure times for subliminal primes are usually up to 500 ms ( Elgendi et al, 2018 , p. 23). Moreover, there was no effect, and mean estimates in the high anchor condition were even lower than in the low anchor condition.…”