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Early and late selection in unconscious information processing.

Carsten Pohl¹, Andrea Kiesel, Wilfried Kunde

¹Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Institut für Psychologie III, 97070 Würzburg, Germany. pohl@psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

|April 7, 2010

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Prestimulus expectations influence how masked stimuli are processed, affecting early or late selection in visual perception. This impacts whether primes influence target recognition based on perceptual or semantic features.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Visual Perception

Background:

Priming experiments investigate how prior exposure to stimuli influences subsequent responses.
The stage of selection (early vs. late) for masked stimuli remains a key debate in cognitive science.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine whether masked stimuli in priming are selected early or late in the processing stream.
To investigate the role of prestimulus expectations in masked stimulus selection.

Main Methods:

Four experiments using masked priming with visual stimuli.
Participants performed classification tasks on target pictures (e.g., size, category).
Varying prime-target relationships (perceptual, semantic) to assess congruency effects.

Main Results:

Early selection observed when primes differed perceptually from targets.
Late selection indicated when novel animal primes, but not unrelated primes, affected responses.
Semantic category, not just perceptual features, influenced priming based on response relevance.

Conclusions:

Prestimulus expectations critically determine the selection stage for masked stimuli.
Masked stimuli are selected based on whether they align with current processing goals and expectations.
Findings support a flexible selection mechanism influenced by top-down factors.