Imaging unconscious semantic priming
NaturePublished 1 October 1998
Stanislas Dehaene, Lionel Naccache, Gurvan Le Clec’H, Étienne Koechlin, Michael L. Mueller, Ghislaine Dehaene‐Lambertz
Citations1,065
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score18.29
SNIP10.16
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TL;DR
The results indicate that masked stimuli have a measurable influence on electrical and haemodynamic measures of brain activity and a stream of perceptual, semantic and motor processes can occur without awareness.
Abstract
Visual words that are masked and presented so briefly that they cannot be seen may nevertheless facilitate the subsequent processing of related words, a phenomenon called masked priming. It has been debated whether masked primes can activate cognitive processes without gaining access to consciousness. Here we use a combination of behavioural and brain-imaging techniques to estimate the depth of processing of masked numerical primes. Our results indicate that masked stimuli have a measurable influence on electrical and haemodynamic measures of brain activity. When subjects engage in an overt semantic comparison task with a clearly visible target numeral, measures of covert motor activity indicate that they also unconsciously apply the task instructions to an unseen masked numeral. A stream of perceptual, semantic and motor processes can therefore occur without awareness.
Keywords
PsychologyMathematicsNeuroscience
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