title: Unconscious manipulation of free choice by novel primes.
abstract: The extent to which non-conscious perception can influence behaviour has been a topic of considerable controversy in psychology for decades. Although a challenging task, convincing empirical demonstrations have emerged suggesting that non-consciously perceived 'prime' stimuli can influence motor responses to subsequent targets. Interestingly, recent studies have shown that the influence of masked primes is not restricted to target-elicited responses, but can also bias free-choices between alternative behaviours. The present experiment extends these findings by showing that free-choices could also be biased by novel primes that never appeared as targets and therefore could not trigger acquired stimulus-response (S-R) mappings. This new evidence suggests that free-choice behaviour can be influenced by non-consciously triggered semantic representations. Furthermore, the results reported here support accounts of masked priming that posit an automatic semantic categorisation of non-consciously perceived visual stimuli.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, QLD 4014, Australia. Electronic address: brenda.ocampo@mindsci.net.
authors.forename: Brenda
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ocampo
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D055641:Mathematical Concepts; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Free will; Semantic priming; Unconscious