The Effect Of Supraliminal And Subliminal Reward Information On Unconscious Cognitive Control

In laboratory studies which employ money as a reward, the individual usually can be rewarded in the task according to the individual’s performance. In recent years, many research results show that not only the supraliminal(above the threshold of consciousness) presented monetary awards can enhance attention, working memory, cognitive control, subliminal(below the threshold of consciousness) presented monetary awards information can also affect individual behavior. The rewards presented subliminal could be like on the rewards presented supraliminal rendered as to promote the task performance of the subjects.There have been studies have shown that the consciousness is not necessary for cognitive control, the cognitive control can also be influenced by unconscious stimulation. This is not only in cognitive control can be affected by subliminal presented reward, but also in some cognitive control(for example, response inhibition, conflict adaptation) can also be induced by unconscious stimulus. Firstly, we talk about the Response Inhibition evoked by unconscious stimulus, Response Inhibition which refers to inhibiting of the current advantages, habitual individual behavior, is an important part of the cognitive control. van Gaal et al.(2010) have used a masked version of go/no-go task to discover the unconscious evoked response inhibition. This study indicated that the response time(RT) of strong masking no- go trials showed a significant delay, relative to the RT of strong masking go trials. At the same time, there are some similarity in neural mechanism between the unconscious response inhibition and the traditional conscious response inhibition. The second cognitive control induced by unconscious stimulus will be discussed is Error Processing. Error Processing is an important capacity that includes the awareness of error and correcting the error timely. van Gaal et al.(2009) have induced unconscious processing error p henomenon by using a special go/no-go task. This study showed that even in the unconscious condition, the post-error delay will also be existed. Finally, unconsciously evoked Conflict Adaptation, conflict adaptation effect refers to the conflict experienced before have an impact on settlement of the conflict experienced later, that is to say the previous experience will be utilized to make a more optimal solution to the current problem. van Gaal(2010) using a masked flanker task successfully exploited unconsciously evoked the conflict adaptation phenomenon. The study showed that regardless of the arrow direction of masking stimuli perceived consciousness, the Flanker effect after incongruent trials(RTiI-iC) is smaller than after congruent trials(RTcI-cC).Although previous studies have explored the consciously evoked cognitive control(such as task switching, memory updating, etc.) under the influence of the supraliminal and subliminal presented reward incentives. Previous studies rarely involved how the unconscious cognitive control influenced by supraliminal and subliminal presented monetary reward. In our study, three experiments were used to explore the under the influence of the supraliminal and subliminal presented reward with unconscious cognitive co ntrol systematically. First, the reward-priming paradigm and the masking go/no- go task was combined to discuss how unconscious evoked response Inhibition influenced by supraliminal and subliminal monetary awards. The results showed that the supraliminal high reward can enhance unconscious response inhibition, and subliminal reward cannot enhance unconscious response inhibition in a statistical significant level. Then, the second experiment combining reward-priming paradigm and the special go/no- go task to investigate the influence of supraliminal and subliminal presented monetary awards rendered unco nscious evoked error processing. Experimental results show that only the supraliminal reward increases individual unconscious error processing. Finally, the third experiment explores the influence of rewards on the unconscious conflict adaptation. The results showed that, on the supraliminal presented high rewards decreases unconscious conflict evoked adaptation.To sum up, the monetary awards presented above the threshold of consciousness can promote cognitive control evoked by unconscious stimuli, except for unconscious conflict adaptation, while subliminal reward cannot enhance unconscious cognitive control in a statistical significant level. This study provides a reference for future study.