The extent to which unconscious information can influence behavior has been a topic of considerable debate throughout the history of psychology. A frequently used method for studying subliminal processing is the masked priming paradigm. The authors focused on studies in which this paradigm was used. Their aim was twofold: first, to assess the magnitude of subliminal priming across the literatur...

We report three masked associative priming experiments with the lexical decision task that explore whether the initial activation flow of a visually presented word activates the semantic representations of that word's orthographic/phonological neighbours. The predictions of cascades and serial/modular models of lexical processing differ widely in this respect. Using a masked priming paradigm (s...

To investigate neighbor effects in visual word recognition, the masked priming technique holds considerable advantages over unprimed methods, because a target word is used as its own control. However, inhibitory neighbor effects obtained with masked priming are still open for different interpretations, because the primes differ across conditions. Given this theoretical problem, it is useful to ...

Using fMRI during a lexical decision task, we investigated the neural correlates of semantic priming under masked and unmasked prime presentation conditions in a repeated measurement design of the same group of 24 participants (14 women). The task was to discriminate between pseudowords and words. Masked and unmasked prime words differed in their degree of semantic relatedness with target stimu...

Four visual lexical decision experiments using the masked priming paradigm tested for effects of prime word frequency and cumulative root frequency with primes varying in degree of morphological and orthographic overlap with free root targets in French. Experiments 1 and 3 showed that only high frequency morphologically related primes produce signiŽcantly faster response times compared to ortho...

BACKGROUND Previous research has yielded evidence for enhanced semantic priming in formal thought-disordered schizophrenia patients, a result that fits well with the hypothesis of disinhibited processes of spreading activation in this population. METHODS The present study tested this hypothesis by using masked repetition priming, which yields reversed semantic priming effects in healthy parti...

English. In this paper we investigate the respective roles of orthographic and morphological structure in the processing of Italian verbal forms by using the masked priming paradigm. According to the morphology-based view, in a priming condition the recognition of an inflected word should be facilitated by the presentation of the stem. The cohort model, instead, postulates that the orthographic...

According to the sensorimotor supremacy hypothesis, conscious perception draws on motor action. In the present report, we will sketch two lines of potential development in the field of masking research based on the sensorimotor supremacy hypothesis. In the first part of the report, evidence is reviewed that masked, invisible stimuli can affect motor responses, attention shifts, and semantic pro...