unconscious cognition revealed!
Sean Draine (seandr@Exchange.Microsoft.com)
Tue, 19 Oct 1999 17:41:04 -0700
Jim asks:
"Can anyone show me this "unconscious"?
I can!
The whole point of my graduate career was to empirically demonstrate
unconscious linguistic processing. We managed to produce some pretty
convincing evidence, including findings that were published in _Science_,
the world's premier scientific journal (the Brits might argue that _Nature_
is more prestigious, but they'd be wrong).
The basic idea is this:
We repeatedly presented pairs of randomly selected, evaluatively polarized
words (e.g., "KILL", "LOVE") to our human subjects, one right after the
other. The first word was visually degraded so as to be imperceptible, or
'subliminal'. The second word was clearly visible.
In one task, subjects were instructed to classify the second, visible word
as pleasant or unpleasant in meaning. On average, subjects responded faster
and more accurately when the first subliminal word had the same evaluative
polarization as the second. In other words, subjects' classifications of the
second word were 'primed' by the meaning of the subliminal word.
In a second task, we instructed subjects to ignore the visible word and
attempt to classify the subliminal word as pleasant or unpleasant in
meaning. This proved to be quite difficult - subjects were unable to respond
with above-chance accuracy.
So, people were sensitive to the meanings of words that they could not
consciously perceive. The explanation - semantic analysis of words is
largely an unconscious, automatic brain process.
If you'd like to read more, go to
http://www.millisecond.com/seandr/psych/papers.html.
-Sean