title: Repeating a strongly masked stimulus increases priming and awareness.
abstract: Previous studies [Marcel, A. J. (1983). Conscious and unconscious perception: Experiments on visual masking and word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 15(2), 197-237; Wentura, D., & Frings, C. (2005). Repeated masked category primes interfere with related exemplars: New evidence for negative semantic priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(1), 108-120] suggested that repeatedly presenting a masked stimulus improves priming without increasing perceptual awareness. However, neural theories of consciousness predict the opposite: Increasing bottom-up strength in such a paradigm should also result in increasing availability to awareness. Here, we tested this prediction by manipulating the number of repetitions of a strongly masked digit. Our results do not replicate the dissociation observed in previous studies and are instead suggestive that repeating an unconscious and attended masked stimulus enables the progressive emergence of perceptual awareness.
authors.affiliation: Consciousness, Cognition and Computation Group, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; Centre de Recherche Cognition et Neurosciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Electronic address: aatas@ulb.ac.be.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Atas
authors.forename: Astrid
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vermeiren
authors.forename: Axel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cleeremans
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D013360:Subliminal Stimulation; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Awareness; Priming; Repeated masking method