Subliminal Processing

supraliminal

above the threshold of awareness

Wilson Bryan Key

argues that media and advertising are full of subliminal messages - subliminal seduction

subliminal

below the threshold of awareness

James Vicary

claimed he inserted ads in movies to encourage concession sales even though he did not

the hillyard principle

claims that when assessing attentional effects in visual perception, you must control the "stimulus energy" between conditions in order to conclude the effect was attentional

exclusion paradigm

inclusion: complete word-stem with prime, exclusion: do not complete word-stem with prime

we have little _____ to our cognitive processes

introspective access

confabulation

making up plausible theories

electric shock

participants assert that reassurance (or lack of) strongly affected their response even though it did not

backmasking: vokey and keys

participants discriminate various properties of backmasked audio, their performance is compared to chance probabilities (random guessing)

debate team

participants falsely recalled their initial opinions as consistent with their current opinion

attractiveness ratings

participants often confabulate reasons as to why they picked a face that they didn't even pick

lingerie experiment

participants pick the rightmost gown 4:1 but list different reasons for their choice

semantic priming - marcel

people cannot explicitly report the prime, but they are more likely to fill in the word stem with the prime

top-down perception

perception that is driven by context, learning, and expectation (ex: phonemic restoration, ponzo illusions)

subliminal perception

perception without awareness; unaware of stimulus, but detected it in some manner; these stimuli could affect our subsequent behaviors or decisions

methods to test subliminal processing

present a stimulus that is below the absolute threshold for detection and test whether it affects subsequent behavior, divert attention for the subliminal message; present the subliminal message very quickly and mask it

dichotic listening task

subliminal detection of words is present

subliminal self-help tapes

the tape label had a strong effect on self-reported improvement; the actual tape identity had absolutely no effect

judas priest lawsuit

two boys attempt suicide on a playground - WBK claims Judas Priest song backwards says do it over and over

backmasking

when you play a song backwards and it contains a hidden message or sound