title: Boundary conditions for the influence of unfamiliar non-target primes in unconscious evaluative priming: The moderating role of attentional task sets.
abstract: Evaluative priming by masked emotional stimuli that are not consciously perceived has been taken as evidence that affective stimulus evaluation can also occur unconsciously. However, as masked priming effects were small and frequently observed only for familiar primes that there also presented as visible targets in an evaluative decision task, priming was thought to reflect primarily response activation based on acquired S-R associations and not evaluative semantic stimulus analysis. The present study therefore assessed across three experiments boundary conditions for the emergence of masked evaluative priming effects with unfamiliar primes in an evaluative decision task and investigated the role of the frequency of target repetition on priming with pictorial and verbal stimuli. While familiar primes elicited robust priming effects in all conditions, priming effects by unfamiliar primes were reliably obtained for low repetition (pictures) or unrepeated targets (words), but not for targets repeated at a high frequency. This suggests that unfamiliar masked stimuli only elicit evaluative priming effects when the task set associated with the visible target involves evaluative semantic analysis and is not based on S-R triggered responding as for high repetition targets. The present results therefore converge with the growing body of evidence demonstrating attentional control influences on unconscious processing.
authors: University of Ulm, Department of Psychiatry, Germany. Electronic address: Markus.Kiefer@uni-ulm.de.
authors: Markus
authors: M
authors: Kiefer
authors: University of Ulm, Department of Psychiatry, Germany.
authors: Eun-Jim
authors: EJ
authors: Sim
authors: Saarland University, Department of Psychology, Germany.
authors: Dirk
authors: D
authors: Wentura
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D060865:Repetition Priming; D013360:Subliminal Stimulation; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attentional control; Automatic processes; Consciousness; Evaluative priming; Pictures; Subliminal perception; Unconscious visual processing; Words