Can unconscious sequential integration of semantic information occur when the prime Chinese characters are displayed from left to right?

Abstract

Recent studies have investigated whether conscious awareness is necessary for semantic integration. Although results have varied, simultaneous presentation of words have consistently led to greater semantic integration than sequential presentation in a single location. The current studies were designed to investigate whether the disadvantage of sequential presentation for unconscious semantic integration is specific to unfamiliar word-byword presentation in one location or extends to the more natural reading conditions of viewing items sequentially from left to right. In Experiment 1, when the first three characters of Chinese idioms were presented simultaneously under masked conditions, performance on a separate two-alternative forcedchoice recognition task was at chance level. Despite being unaware of the identity of prime characters, participants were faster to indicate that a subsequent item was a Chinese character when it was congruent with the beginning of the idiom, thus providing evidence of semantic integration. In contrast, when the three (Experiment 2) or two (Experiment 3) prime characters were presented sequentially in time from left to right, there was no evidence of semantic integration. These results indicate that unconscious semantic integration is more limited than previously reported, and may require simultaneous visual presentation.

B or 13? Unconscious Top-Down Contextual Effects at the Categorical but Not the Lexical Level

“…Yet the fact that this effect was limited to categorical contexts only, and not lexical ones, gives rise to two alternative interpretations of the results: The first suggests that our findings actually highlight the limits of unconscious integration. This interpretation is in line with the windows-of-integration hypothesis (Mudrik et al, 2014), which was thus far mostly tested in the temporal domain (e.g., Faivre & Koch, 2014; Tu et al, 2019). Under this interpretation, unconscious categorical contextual effects reflect integration that takes place over small integration windows (here, semantically defined), which can be performed without awareness.…”

Unconscious integration: Current evidence for integrative processing under subliminal conditions

“…lack of awareness). However, studies normally used only NHST, including in many recent studies purportedly showing SI (Hung & Hsieh, 2021; Liu et al, 2020; Tu et al, 2020; Tu, Liu, et al, 2019; Tu, Wan, et al, 2019).…”

How do multiple masked relevant prime stimuli affect a conscious response: Two prime arrows produce independent priming effects on the target response

“…Recently, based on a large amount of evidence of unconscious processing (Bruno et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2020;Eriksson et al, 2020;Soto et al, 2019), it has been found that multiple subliminal stimuli can integrate with each other. This nding greatly advanced the understanding of unconscious information processing and integration (Hirschhorn et al, 2021;Tu et al, 2020;Van Opstal, 2021;Wang et al, 2017).…”