title: Exogenous spatial cueing modulates subliminal masked priming.
abstract: An experiment combined exogenous spatial cueing with masked repetition priming. The task consisted of an alphabetic decision task (letter/pseudo-letter classification) with central targets and peripheral primes that were preceded by a valid or invalid spatial cue in the form of an exogenous abrupt onset. In an analysis including only participants who were not aware of prime stimuli, exogenous location cueing was found to reliably modulate the size of unconscious priming effects. These findings suggest that in early vision the exogenous cue boosts the signal at the location of the cue resulting in a higher gain for the subliminal prime. Our findings therefore suggest that exogenous cueing can affect the first feedforward sweep of information through the brain, a processing stream which is considered to be automatic and unconscious.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Université de Provence, 3 place Victor Hugo, 13331 Marseille cedex 1, France. yousri.marzouki@up.univ-mrs.fr
authors.forename: Yousri
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Marzouki
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Grainger
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Theeuwes
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011930:Reaction Time; D013028:Space Perception; D013359:Sublimation, Psychological