Extending a focused attention paradigm to critically test for unconscious congruency effects

ABSTRACT

In a novel integration of research designs, we tested for unconscious perception effects at an unattended stimulus location using a focused attention paradigm (Lachter, J., Forster, K. I., & Ruthruff, E. 2004. Forty-five years after Broadbent (1958): Still no identification without attention. Psychological Review, 111(4), 880–913. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.111.4.880). Target-masked word or nonword prime stimuli were briefly displayed for 14, 28, or 56 ms at an experimentally-defined attended or unattended location, followed by a lexical decision task. At the briefest prime durations (14 and 28 ms), we failed to find any evidence for unattended priming effects, consistent with Lachter et al., but there were some small priming (i.e., congruency) effects at the attended location. The 14 ms primes could not be discriminated above chance, but could be detected. Our results support the claim that perceptual processing is strongest with focal attention. For the 14 ms primes at the attended location, results could support an unconscious perception claim, but the effect was weak and awareness of the primes was unlikely to have been completely eliminated.

KEYWORDS:

• Congruency effects
• lexical decision
• selective attention
• unconscious perception
• visual masking

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Caitlyn Findley, Jackie Smith, April Hall, Hayleigh Hale, Sherry Blakey, Caroline Brough, and Alice Thompson for assisting with data collection and analysis. We also thank reviewers for their constructive feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).