An Experimental Study of the Effects of Subliminal Stimulation on Attention Perception

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the effect of task difficulty and dual channel subliminal stimulation on people’s attention perception. Methods: 24 college students were recruited to participate in the experiment. The experimental program was compiled by E-Prime software on the basis of the paradigm of attention span. The experimental task was to determine the number of red pentagram stars presented on the computer screen quickly and accurately. Two factors mixed design was used in this experiment. Task difficulty and subliminal stimulation are the two independent variables, each of which contains three levels. When the number of pentagram stars to be judged was 5–9, it was of low difficulty; correspondingly, 10–14 was of medium task difficulty, and 15–19 was of high task difficulty. The three levels of subliminal stimulation are as follows: “no subliminal stimulus”, which can be regarded as a control group, “auditory subliminal stimulus” and “audiovisual subliminal stimulus”. In order to avoid the effect of experimental sequence, the order of subjects participating in the experiment was balanced in advance according to the independent variable of the type of subliminal stimulation. Results: The main effect of task difficulty on perception was significant (p 0.05); the interaction between task difficulty and subliminal stimulation was not significant (p > 0.05). Conclusions: With the increase of task difficulty, the error of perceptual judgment increases, that is, the accuracy decreases. Subliminal stimulation designed in this paper has no obvious effect on perceptual judgment, but from the mean of the absolute value of perceptual error, it can be seen that judgment bias in the comprehensive intervention group of “audiovisual subliminal stimulation” has a downward trend, which shows that subliminal stimulation can improve the accuracy of attention cognition to a very small extent. The research direction of this experiment is worth further exploration. In future experiments, it is necessary to personalize the intensity and duration of subliminal stimulation according to the definition of sensory threshold, so as to enhance its effect.