Imaging unconscious semantic priming

Stanislas Dehaene (), Lionel Naccache, Gurvan Le Clec'H, Etienne Koechlin, Michael Mueller, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Pierre-FranÇois van de Moortele and Denis Le Bihan
Additional contact information
Stanislas Dehaene: INSERM U.334, Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV
Lionel Naccache: INSERM U.334, Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV
Gurvan Le Clec'H: INSERM U.334, Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV
Etienne Koechlin: INSERM U.334, Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV
Michael Mueller: INSERM U.334, Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS/CNRS
Pierre-FranÇois van de Moortele: Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV
Denis Le Bihan: Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV

Nature, 1998, vol. 395, issue 6702, 597-600

Abstract: Abstract Visual words that are masked and presented so briefly that they cannot be seen may nevertheless facilitate the subsequent processing of related words, a phenomenon called masked priming1,2. It has been debated whether masked primes can activate cognitive processes without gaining access to consciousness3,4,5. Here we use a combination of behavioural and brain-imaging techniques to estimate the depth of processing of masked numerical primes. Our results indicate that masked stimuli have a measurable influence on electrical and haemodynamic measures of brain activity. When subjects engage in an overt semantic comparison task with a clearly visible target numeral, measures of covert motor activity indicate that they also unconsciously apply the task instructions to an unseen masked numeral. A stream of perceptual, semantic and motor processes can therefore occur without awareness.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/26967 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:395:y:1998:i:6702:d:10.1038_26967

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/26967

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().