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Abstract:
In current theories of human cognition, the unconscious
processes that underlie masked semantic priming are considered as
automatic processes that do not require attention (Posner &
Snyder, 1975) (Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977) (Eysenck, 1984). In
contrast with this dominant view we demonstrate here that the
conscious allocation of temporal attention, a pure top-down
cognitive process, determines the existence of unconscious semantic
processing. Using a visual masked semantic priming procedure, we
show that on trials with an identical onset asynchrony between
prime and target stimuli, we either obtain or fail to obtain
unconscious semantic priming depending on whether subjects allocate
attention to the time interval during which the prime
appears.
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