Repeating a strongly masked stimulus increases priming and awareness

Abstract

Previous studies [Marcel, A. J. (1983). Conscious and unconscious perception: Experiments on visual masking and word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 15(2), 197-237; Wentura, D., & Frings, C. (2005). Repeated masked category primes interfere with related exemplars: New evidence for negative semantic priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(1), 108-120] suggested that repeatedly presenting a masked stimulus improves priming without increasing perceptual awareness. However, neural theories of consciousness predict the opposite: Increasing bottom-up strength in such a paradigm should also result in increasing availability to awareness. Here, we tested this prediction by manipulating the number of repetitions of a strongly masked digit. Our results do not replicate the dissociation observed in previous studies and are instead suggestive that repeating an unconscious and attended masked stimulus enables the progressive emergence of perceptual awareness.

Keywords: Awareness; Priming; Repeated masking method.