The concept of subliminal perception has been a subject of interest and controversy for decades. Of interest in the present investigation was whether a neurophysiologic index of stimulus change could be elicited to speech sound contrasts that were consciously indiscriminable. The stimuli were chosen on the basis of each individual subject's discrimination threshold. The speech stimuli (which va...

In the metacontrast dissociation procedure, presenting a masked shape prime prior to a visible shape target leads to reaction-time effects of the prime in an indirect measure, although participants cannot consciously detect prime shapes in a direct measure (Klotz & Neumann, 1999). This has been taken as evidence for the processing of unconscious input. The results of the present metacontrast di...

We describe recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potential (ERP) studies of visual extinction in patients with right parietal damage who can detect isolated visual stimuli on either side, yet often miss contralesional (left) stimuli during bilateral stimulation. We consider the neural fate of such extinguished visual stimuli and how neural responses differ for c...

Dichotic stimulus pairs were constructed with one word that was emotionally neutral and another that evoked either negative or positive feelings. Temporal and spectral overlap between the members of each pair was so great that the two words fused into a single auditory percept. Subjects were consciously aware of hearing only one word from most pairs; sometimes the emotion-evoking word was heard...

Previous studies suggested that emotions can be correctly interpreted from facial expressions in the absence of conscious awareness of the face. Our goal was to explore whether subordinate information about a face's gender and race could also become available without awareness of the face. Participants classified the race or the gender of unfamiliar faces that were ambiguous with regard to thes...

It is clear that we are able to process semantic information from stimuli that are masked and not consciously perceived according to objective threshold criteria (Bodner & Masson, 2003; Dell’Aqua & Grainger, 2001). It has been argued that these unconscious semantic priming effects cannot be attributed to consciously controlled processes – such as expectancy – since these processes cannot operat...

Although non-consciously perceived information has previously been assumed to be short-lived (< 500 ms), recent findings show that non-consciously perceived information can be maintained for at least 15 s. Such findings can be explained as working memory without a conscious experience of the information to be retained. However, whether or not working memory can operate on non-consciously percei...