| Title: Unconscious Priming for Location and the Role of Spatial Attention. Authors: Xavier Sonnerat and Mark R. Klinger, University of Alabama. Problem: This study investigated whether unconscious priming for location judgments could be observed using Greenwald, Draine, and Abrams' (1996) unconscious priming methodology. Additionally, Klinger and Willis (in preparation) showed that spreading participants' spatial attention over a wide area resulted in smaller unconscious priming effects for affective judgments. A second study tested whether the same thing happens for location judgments. Procedure: In Experiment 1, 61 participants judged the affective valence or the location of target words presented in one of two central locations. A masked prime was presented before the target in one of these locations. Primes and targets were congruent in affect and/or location on half of the trials. A response window procedure assured fast responses. Following this priming task (indirect measure of perception), participants completed a prime perceptibility task (direct measure of perception) to verify their non-ability to consciously perceive the primes. In Experiment 2, 60 new participants went through the same procedures. The only difference was that primes and targets appeared in one of two more peripheral locations. This was designed to spread the participants' spatial attention. Results: The sensitivity measure, d', was computed for the indirect and direct measures of perception. The indirect measure was regressed on the direct measure (Greenwald, Klinger, & Schuh, 1995). This method gives two parameters of interest: the intercept indicates the amount of priming when prime perceptibility is near zero; the slope indicates how priming varies with prime perceptibility. Table 1 shows intercepts and slopes for both experiments. As can be seen, large intercepts were observed for affect judgments [t(24)=6.49, p<.001] and location judgments [t(24)=3.89, p=.001]. These two intercepts did not reliably differ [F(1, 49)=1.94, p =.17], and neither slope was significant. In Experiment 2, intercept effects were observed for the affect judgments [t(25)=5.55, p<.001], but they were reliably smaller than in Experiment 1 [F(1, 50)=14.93, p<.001]. Large intercept effects were observed for the location judgments [t(27)=6.59, p<.001] and were not reliably different than in Experiment 1 [F(1, 52)=.75, p=.39]. Neither slope was significant. Discussion: These results show: 1) unconscious location priming can be obtained using Greenwald et al.'s (1996) methodology; 2) unconscious location priming did not decrease when spatial attention was spread as observed for affective priming. It seems that location information does not need spatial attention to be unconsciously perceived. References: Greenwald, A. G., Draine, S. C, and Abrams, R. L. (1996). Three cognitive markers of unconscious semantic activation. Science, 273, 1699-1702. Greenwald, A. G., Klinger, M., & Schuh, E. (1995). Activation by marginally perceptible (“subliminal”) stimuli: Dissociation of unconscious from conscious cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124, 22-42. Klinger, M. R., and Willis, S. (in preparation). Mechanisms of unconscious priming: The role of spatial attention. Table 1: Intercepts and slopes obtained from the regression analyses, expressed as d' units, for both experiments. Condition Intercept Slope Experiment 1 (central locations) Affective judgments .36* .10 Location judgments .25* .22 Experiment 2 (peripheral locations) Affective judgments .17* -.09 Location judgments .31* .14 *p<.001 |
| This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, Illinois on May 4, 2001. |
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