The power of unconscious semantic processing: The effect of semantic relatedness between prime and target on subliminal priming

Eva Van Den Bussche,Karolien Smets,Delphine Sasanguie,Bert Reynvoet

doi:10.5334/pb-52-1-59

Eva Van Den Bussche, Karolien Smets + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5334/pb-52-1-59

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Journal: Psychologica Belgica	Publication Date: Apr 1, 2012
Citations: 8	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: KU Leuven, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that subliminal priming effects can be of a semantic nature. However, the question remains how strong this kind of priming will prove to be. In the present study we investigated whether truly semantic unconscious priming only occurs for prime-target pairs that are strongly semantically related (e.g., cat-DOG) or whether priming effects can also be observed for pairs that are less semantically related (e.g., ant-DOG). A typical masked priming paradigm, with word primes and picture targets, was used and the relatedness between prime and target was manipulated. The results showed that prime-target relatedness significantly moderated the effects. A priming effect was only found for the strongly related prime-target pairs. This indicates that semantic subliminal priming requires a sufficient amount of semantic relatedness between prime and target, rendering it as sensitive to this semantic factor as supraliminal priming.

Highlights

A masked or subliminal prime can enhance the categorization of a subsequent target when prime and target evoke the same response and disturb the categorization when they do not
It is becoming increasingly more clear that subliminal priming effects can be of a semantic nature (e.g., Van den Bussche et al, 2009a)
Previous research using the unmasked priming paradigm has shown that the semantic relatedness between prime and target moderates the amount of priming observed

Summary

Introduction

A masked or subliminal prime can enhance the categorization of a subsequent target when prime and target evoke the same response and disturb the categorization when they do not (see for example Dehaene et al.,1998; see Van den Bussche, Van den Noortgate & Reynvoet, 2009b for a meta-analysis on masked priming effects). According to Damian (2001) a direct S-R link can be formed for masked primes to which participants have to overtly respond during the task These direct S-R mappings can lead to the emergence of priming effects. According to Kunde, Kiesel and Hoffmann (2003), participants will prepare action triggers for the stimuli they might receive in the experiment during the task instructions These action triggers create automatic associations between all expected stimuli and their appropriate responses. When the primes fell outside the expected stimulus range or when they were presented in an unexpected format, no priming was observed This action-trigger account predicts that participants will only be able to form action triggers for expected stimuli. If the (expected) format of the targets differs from the (not expected) format of the primes, no action triggers will be formed for these primes and they will be unable to elicit priming

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Results

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