Short- and Long-Term Effects of Conscious, Minimally Conscious and Unconscious Brand Logos

Abstract

Unconsciously presented information can influence our behavior in an experimental context. However, whether these effects can be translated to a daily life context, such as advertising, is strongly debated. What hampers this translation is the widely accepted notion of the short-livedness of unconscious representations. The effect of unconscious information on behavior is assumed to rapidly vanish within a few hundreds of milliseconds. Using highly familiar brand logos (e.g., the logo of McDonald's) as subliminal and supraliminal primes in two priming experiments, we assessed whether these logos were able to elicit behavioral effects after a short (e.g., 350 ms), a medium (e.g., 1000 ms), and a long (e.g., 5000 ms) interval. Our results demonstrate that when real-life information is presented minimally consciously or even unconsciously, it can influence our subsequent behavior, even when more than five seconds pass between the presentation of the minimally conscious or unconscious information and the behavior on which it exerts its influence.

Reversed Priming Effects May Be Driven by Misperception Rather than Subliminal Processing

“…Furthermore, the present data are also in conflict with several studies that used an objective measure of perception and that did report subliminal semantic priming (e.g., Finkbeiner, 2011; Muscarella et al, 2013). The lack of support for subliminal priming in the present study may be explained by the paradigm used.…”

“…Third, it might be that the stimuli used here allowed for better estimation of prime perception, d′ . In previous studies (e.g., Finkbeiner, 2011; Muscarella et al, 2013), the prime and target have been perceptually similar (i.e., both words) so the target could interfere with the prime response, which would lead to underestimated prime perception, d′ (Vermeiren and Cleeremans, 2012). In contrast, in the current experiment, primes and targets were highly dissimilar (i.e., a word and colored rectangle); as discussed by Van den Bussche et al (2013), this makes it easier for participants to judge whether or not they perceived the prime.…”

“…This standard paradigm is still widely used (e.g., Finkbeiner, 2011; Muscarella et al, 2013; González-García et al, 2015; Schoeberl et al, 2015) but has been criticized as not strongly supporting conclusions either for or against subliminal processing. To conclude that a cognitive process is independent of perception, researchers must first support the claim that the stimulus was subliminal—not even slightly perceived—for all participants.…”

Subliminal versus supraliminal stimuli activate neural responses in anterior cingulate cortex, fusiform gyrus and insula: a meta-analysis of fMRI studies

“…Recent brain imaging evidence suggests that subliminal stimuli can alter behavior, via non-conscious processes (Muscarella et al 2013 ; Eimer & Schlaghecken 2003 ). Neural models of behavior elicited by non-conscious stimuli implicate the prefrontal and cingulate cortices in the regulation of subcortical brain regions linked to impulsive and largely non-conscious stimulus perception (Ochsner et al 2012 ).…”

The motivational unconscious

“…The potential relevance of prime-target SOA is illustrated by recent study of semantic priming by Muscarella and her colleagues (Muscarella, Brintazzoli, Gordts, Soetens, & van den Bussche, 2013). Their first study employed familiar product logos (e.g., McDonald's arches and the Nike swoosh) as primes in a lexical decision task where the targets were related and unrelated brand names (e.g., McDonald's and Nike) and words (e.g., hamburger and sport).…”