title: Awareness of distractors is necessary to generate a strategy to avoid responding to them: A commentary on Lin and Murray (2015).
abstract: Lin and Murray published in the 2015 January Issue of Psychological Science a study that claims to have made the surprising discovery of unconscious effects that are stronger than equivalent conscious effects. Specifically, the authors claim to have uncovered dissociable components of aware and unaware orienting and inhibition in exogenous cueing. They suggest an awareness-dependent location-based inhibition mechanism referred to as a negative attentional aftereffect. Here we argue for a simpler explanation, based on established literature, that all they have shown is response inhibition to a consciously perceived cue presented at a fixed location.
authors.affiliation: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Theeuwes
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Manon
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mulckhuyse
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Christie
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada. Electronic address: ray.klein@dal.ca.
authors.forename: Raymond M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Klein
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Awareness; Distractors; Invisible cues; Response-inhibition; Unconscious