Level Of Processing In Subliminal Perceptual Priming Occurred Conditions

Subliminal perception has been studied since the rise of modern psychology. There have been lots of controversies concerning it: does subliminal perception do exist? How do we know a stimulus have been processed subliminally? What level can subliminal perception reach? And what impact can it have on people's behaviors? Introspection have adopted by early researchers to judge if a stimulus have accessed to consciousness, but other researchers (Eriksen, 1960) argued that a objective threshold should been employed. New paradigms, such as masked priming paradigm and processes dissociation paradigm, have been designed, but they all called forth sharp criticism for serious methodological flaws (Holender, 1986). Psycholinguistic has made major contribution to the improvement of masked priming paradigm.In the lately 1990, Dehaene et al. (1998) and Greenwald et al. (1996) have brought forth substantial evidences on the existence of subliminal perception. But there still have controversies around which level can subliminal perception reach. When some researcher argued the subliminal stimuli can been processed semantically, other researcher think it's a shallow processing based on the visual characteristic of stimuli. Both side have empirical evidences to support their views.Based on previous researches, this study use masked priming paradigm with picture, Chinese words and Arabic digits have as stimuli to explore the depth and potential moderators of priming effects. The results of experiment 1 and 2 show significant priming effects when eliminating nonsemantic effects. Experiment 2 shows that significant priming emerged for large stimulus category and a large target set, but not for a small target set. This indicates that the task context will determine whether stimuli will be processed semantically or nonsemantically, which in turn can influence priming effect. experiment 3 show that the attention (prime attended or not) was a prerequisite for a stimulus to elicit priming, only attended stimuli can elicit significant priming, through the subjects cannot report what stimuli he/she have see.