Unconscious processing of dichoptically masked words

Abstract

In three experiments, the subjects' task was to decide whether each of a series of words connoted something good (e.g., fame, comedy, rescue)or bad (stress, detest, malaria), One-half second before the presentation of each such target word, an evaluatively polarized priming word was presented briefly to the nondominant eye and was masked dichoptically by either the rapidly following (Experiment 1) or simultaneous (Experiments 2 and 3) presentation of a random letterfragment pattern to the dominant eye. (The effectiveness ofthe masking procedure was demonstrated by the subjects' inability to discriminate the left vs. right position of a test series of words.) In all experiments, significant masked priming effects were obtained; evaluative decisions to congruent masked prime-target combinations (such as a positive masked prime followed by a positive target) were significantly faster than those to incongruent (e.g., negative prime/positive target) or noncongruent (e.g., neutral prime/positive target) combinations. Also, in two of the three experiments, when subjects were at chance accuracy in discriminating word position, their position judgments were nevertheless significantly influenced by the irrelevant semantic content (LEFT vs. RIGHT) of the masked position-varying words. The series of experiments demonstrated that two very different tasks-speeded judgment of evaluative meaning and nonspeeded judgment of word position-yielded statistically significant and replicable influences of the semantic content of apparently undetectable words. Coupled with previous research by others using the lexical decision task, these findings converge in establishing the reliability of the empirical phenomenon of semantic processing of words that are rendered undetectable by dichoptic pattern masking.

Unconscious perception: A model-based approach to method and evidence

“…Although Greenwald and associates' initial work (Greenwald, Klinger, & Liu, 1989) produced apparently reliable objective threshold results, a large-sample followup yielded only mixed results. Rather than concluding that objective threshold effects do not exist, however, Greenwald and associates have recently suggested (e.g., Greenwald et al, 1996) that unconscious perceptual effects are intrinsically very short lived.…”

“…(The Exhaustiveness Problem) As Merikle and Reingold (1990) noted, various measures have been used as conscious perception indexes, including detection (e.g., Dagenbach et al, 1989), forcedchoice identification (Cheesman & Merikle, 1984, and forced-choice position discrimination (e.g., Greenwald et al, 1989;Greenwald et al, 1995). Given this apparent lack of consensus, Reingold and Merikle (1988) argued that no principled basis existed to determine which, if any, of these measures validly indexed conscious perception.…”

New Look 3: Unconscious cognition reclaimed.

“…If the evidence for cognitively sophisticated capabilities of unconscious cognition does not soon switch from being controversial to being conclusive, it will be time, at last, to abandon psychoanalytic theory's proposal that unconscious cognition is the analytic peer (or superior) of conscious cognition. Greenwald and Liu (1985) made an unsuccessful attempt to meet this challenge, using the subliminal evaluative priming task of Greenwald et al (1989). In Greenwald and Liu's test, evaluative meanings of twoword subliminal priming sentences were designed to be uncorrelated with the evaluative meanings of their component words (examples were enemy loses andfriend wins, both of which are evaluatively positive as sentences despite having opposed evaluative meanings at the level of single words).…”

Implicit stereotyping in person judgment.

“…Dimensions of applicability or match identified in the construct accessibility literature include (a) the match in denotative meaning between primed information and target behaviors (Higgins et al, 1977;Srull & Wyer, 1979), (b) the procedural match between priming and judgment tasks (Smith, 1989(Smith, , 1990Smith & Branscombe, 1987,1988, and (c) the match between prime valence and target valence Greenwald et al, 1989). Thus, whether the dependent variable is memory or judgment, a match in theoretically specified features of the learning and memory/judgment conditions is crucial.…”

“…On a variety of measures of memory and judgment, and appearing under a variety of names (e.g., encoding specificity, transfer-appropriate processing, semantic priming, and applicability), research has confirmed the crucial role of a match between conditions that operate at learning or initial exposure and those that operate at retrieval or judgment. The nature of the match has been identified as deriving from context variables (Eich, 1980), procedures or process variables (Roediger, Weldon, & Challis, 1989;Smith, 1990;Tulving & Thomson, 1973), and content variables (semantic content: Brown, 1953;Erdley & DAgostino, 1988;Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977;Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971;Neely, 1977;Srull & Wyer, 1979; evaluative content: Bargh et al, 1992;Greenwald, Klinger, & Liu, 1989).…”