New Unconscious Hassin, Ran R; Uleman, James S; Bargh, John A
2004, 2004-11-11, 2004-10-21
eBook
This collection of 20 original chapters by leading researchers examines the cognitive unconscious from social, cognitive, and neuroscientific viewpoints, presenting some of the most important ...developments at the heart of the new picture of the unconscious.
•Unconscious processes are debated, due to issues with showing absence of awareness.•We tested unconscious semantic priming using different analysis strategies.•Adopting common practices, we produced ...false evidence for unconscious priming.•Recently proposed best practices could prevent such erroneous conclusions.•We suggest improvements for future studies on unconscious processing.
One widely used scientific approach to studying consciousness involves contrasting conscious operations with unconscious ones. However, challenges in establishing the absence of conscious awareness have led to debates about the extent and existence of unconscious processes. We collected experimental data on unconscious semantic priming, manipulating prime presentation duration to highlight the critical role of the analysis approach in attributing priming effects to unconscious processing. We demonstrate that common practices like post-hoc data selection, low statistical power, and frequentist statistical testing can erroneously support claims of unconscious priming. Conversely, adopting best practices like direct performance-awareness contrasts, Bayesian tests, and increased statistical power can prevent such erroneous conclusions. Many past experiments, including our own, fail to meet these standards, casting doubt on previous claims about unconscious processing. Implementing these robust practices will enhance our understanding of unconscious processing and shed light on the functions and neural mechanisms of consciousness.
•We assessed congruency priming from masked novel (unpractised) prime words.•Reaction times and event-related potentials to visible word targets were recorded.•Targets were preceded by either ...strongly, weakly or unrelated masked prime words.•Behavioral and ERP (N400) priming was found only from strongly related masked primes.•Unconscious congruency priming reflects semantic processing of the masked primes.
The mechanisms underlying masked congruency priming, semantic mechanisms such as semantic activation or non-semantic mechanisms, for example response activation, remain a matter of debate. In order to decide between these alternatives, reaction times (RTs) and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in the present study, while participants performed a semantic categorization task on visible word targets that were preceded either 167ms (Experiment 1) or 34ms before (Experiment 2) by briefly presented (33ms) novel (unpracticed) masked prime words. The primes and targets belonged to different categories (unrelated), or they were either strongly or weakly semantically related category co-exemplars. Behavioral (RT) and electrophysiological masked congruency priming effects were significantly greater for strongly related pairs than for weakly related pairs, indicating a semantic origin of effects. Priming in the latter condition was not statistically reliable. Furthermore, priming effects modulated the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, an electrophysiological index of semantic processing, but not ERPs in the time range of the N200 component, associated with response conflict and visuo-motor response priming. The present results demonstrate that masked congruency priming from novel prime words also depends on semantic processing of the primes and is not exclusively driven by non-semantic mechanisms such as response activation.
Objective: This study innovatively investigated the potential selection bias involved in processing multiple subliminal stimuli during creative problem-solving (CPS). It addresses the existing gap in ...specialized research on how the handling of multiple unconscious stimuli influences higher-order cognitive processes, particularly creativity. Methods: The study utilized a masked priming paradigm and a remote association task (RAT). Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 presented two stimuli simultaneously, with one being the correct answer, to examine whether there was a bias in the location of subliminal stimuli. In Experiment 2, two stimuli were presented sequentially, with one serving as the answer, to investigate whether there was a temporal bias in unconscious processing. Results: Our findings revealed that when solving easy RATs, subliminal stimuli presented on the left side had a negative priming effect compared to the right side. The results revealed that unconscious processing of subliminal stimuli enhanced performance on difficult CPS. Additionally, a temporal bias was observed, with more recent subliminal stimuli having a stronger effect than earlier stimuli. Conclusion: Unconscious processing can improve CPS, especially for difficult tasks, and there is a bias towards processing stimuli on the left and more recently presented stimuli. These findings contribute to our understanding of unconscious processing, particularly the processing of multiple subliminal stimuli in CPS, and provide insights into the biases that exist in unconscious processing. Keywords: unconscious priming, creative problem solving, remote association test, unconscious processing bias, multiple unconscious influences
•Emotions comprise conscious, behavioural, physiological and cognitive elements.•Neural correlates of conscious emotion can be investigated in humans and animals.•Contemporary theories of ...consciousness have differing implications for animals.
The componential view of human emotion recognises that affective states comprise conscious, behavioural, physiological, neural and cognitive elements. Although many animals display bodily and behavioural changes consistent with the occurrence of affective states similar to those seen in humans, the question of whether and in which species these are accompanied by conscious experiences remains controversial. Finding scientifically valid methods for investigating markers for the subjective component of affect in both humans and animals is central to developing a comparative understanding of the processes and mechanisms of affect and its evolution and distribution across taxonomic groups, to our understanding of animal welfare, and to the development of animal models of affective disorders. Here, contemporary evidence indicating potential markers of conscious processing in animals is reviewed, with a view to extending this search to include markers of conscious affective processing. We do this by combining animal-focused approaches with investigations of the components of conscious and non-conscious emotional processing in humans, and neuropsychological research into the structure and functions of conscious emotions.
The results showed that the target visibility masking interval and the singleton manipulation affected the accuracy and subjective target awareness independently, supporting the concept of ...independent roles of stimulus-driven attention and awareness. ...although attention is often entangled in the relationship with consciousness, the dissociation of attention from consciousness makes unconscious attention possible. ...for specific unconscious processing, even under relatively strict unconscious standards, there were studies that proved the existence of unconscious processing, especially regarding the recent evidence for relatively complex unconscious processing, such as unconscious integration. Shen Tu1*, Jerwen Jou2, Guang Zhao3 and Jun Jiang4* * 1Department of Psychology, School of Public Administration, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Guiyang, China * 2Department of Psychological Science, University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX, United States * 3Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China * 4Department of Basic Psychology, School of Psychology, Third Military Medical University, Chongqing, China
It is not well known that The Ego and the Id, where Freud presented his second model of the mind, and introduced a new role for the Ego, was ignored by many of the major theorists that followed. I ...will attempt to demonstrate the importance of this new view of the ego for clinical psychoanalysis, and what has been lost by its being ignored.
Whether the native language of bilingual individuals is active during second-language comprehension is the subject of lively debate. Studies of bilingualism have often used a mix of first- and ...second-language words, thereby creating an artificial "dual-language" context. Here, using event-related brain potentials, we demonstrate implicit access to the first language when bilinguals read words exclusively in their second language. Chinese-English bilinguals were required to decide whether English words presented in pairs were related in meaning or not; they were unaware of the fact that half of the words concealed a character repetition when translated into Chinese. Whereas the hidden factor failed to affect behavioral performance, it significantly modulated brain potentials in the expected direction, establishing that English words were automatically and unconsciously translated into Chinese. Critically, the same modulation was found in Chinese monolinguals reading the same words in Chinese, i.e., when Chinese character repetition was evident. Finally, we replicated this pattern of results in the auditory modality by using a listening comprehension task. These findings demonstrate that native-language activation is an unconscious correlate of second-language comprehension.
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