Subliminal number priming within and across the visual and auditory modalities

Whether masked number priming involves a low-level sensorimotor route or an amodal semantic level of processing remains highly debated. Several alternative interpretations have been put forward, proposing either that masked number priming is solely a byproduct of practice with numbers, or that stimulus awareness was underestimated. In a series of four experiments, we studied whether repetition and congruity priming for numbers reliably extend to novel (i.e., unpracticed) stimuli and whether priming transfers from a visual prime to an auditory target, even when carefully controlling for stimulus awareness. While we consistently observed cross-modal priming, the generalization to novel stimuli was weaker and reached significance only when considering the whole set of experiments. We conclude that number priming does involve an amodal, semantic level of processing, but is also modulated by task settings.