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Task-induced attention load guides and gates unconscious semantic interference.

ABSTRACT: The tight relationship between attention and conscious perception has been extensively researched in the past decades. However, whether attentional modulation extended to unconscious processes remained largely unknown, particularly when it came to abstract and high-level processing. Here we use a double Stroop paradigm to demonstrate that attention load gates unconscious semantic processing. We find that word and color incongruencies between a subliminal prime and a supraliminal target cause slower responses to non-Stroop target words-but only if the task is to name the target word (low-load task), and not if the task is to name the target's color (high-load task). The task load hypothesis is confirmed by showing that the word-induced incongruence effect can be detected in the color-naming task, but only in the late, practiced trials. We further replicate this task-induced attentional modulation phenomenon in separate experiments with colorless words (word-only) and words with semantic relationship but no orthographic similarities (semantics-only).

SUBMITTER: Hung SM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7190740 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Task-induced attention load guides and gates unconscious semantic interference.

Hung Shao-Min SM Wu Daw-An DA Shimojo Shinsuke S

Nature communications 20200429 1

The tight relationship between attention and conscious perception has been extensively researched in the past decades. However, whether attentional modulation extended to unconscious processes remained largely unknown, particularly when it came to abstract and high-level processing. Here we use a double Stroop paradigm to demonstrate that attention load gates unconscious semantic processing. We find that word and color incongruencies between a subliminal prime and a supraliminal target cause slo ...[more]

PMID: 32350246

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Project description:Semantic processing of visually presented words can be identified both on behavioral and neurophysiological evidence. One of the major discoveries of the last decades is the demonstration that these signatures of semantic processing, initially observed for consciously perceived words, can also be detected for masked words inaccessible to conscious reports. In this context, the distinction between conscious and unconscious verbal semantic processing constitutes a challenging scientific issue. A prominent view considered that while conscious representations are subject to executive control, unconscious ones would operate automatically in a modular way, independent from control and top-down influences. Recent findings challenged this view by revealing that endogenous attention and task-setting can have a strong influence on unconscious processing. However, one of the major arguments supporting the automaticity of unconscious semantic processing still stands, stemming from a seminal observation reported by Marcel in 1980 about polysemous words. In the present study we reexamined this evidence. We present a combination of behavioral and event-related-potentials (ERPs) results that refute this view by showing that the current conscious semantic context has a major and similar influence on the semantic processing of both visible and masked polysemous words. In a classical lexical decision task, a polysemous word was preceded by a word which defined the current semantic context. Crucially, this context was associated with only one of the two meanings of the polysemous word, and was followed by a word/pseudo-word target. Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of semantic priming of target words by masked polysemous words was strongly dependent on the conscious context. Moreover, we describe a new type of influence related to the response-code used to answer for target words in the lexical decision task: unconscious semantic priming constrained by the conscious context was present both in behavior and ERPs exclusively when right-handed subjects were instructed to respond to words with their right hand. The strong and respective influences of conscious context and response-code on semantic processing of masked polysemous words demonstrate that unconscious verbal semantic representations are not automatic.

Dataset Information

Task-induced attention load guides and gates unconscious semantic interference.

Publications

Task-induced attention load guides and gates unconscious semantic interference.

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