Armstrong, Anna-Marie and Dienes, Zoltan (2014) Subliminal understanding of active versus passive sentences. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 1 (1). pp. 32-50. ISSN 2326-5523

PDF - Published Version Restricted to SRO admin only Download (283kB)

Abstract

Three experiments were run in an attempt to demonstrate the unconscious processing of active-versus-passive sentences. Using subjective measures to assess individual thresholds of subliminal perception, participants were presented with a prime sentence that denoted whether 1 of 2 characters was active or passive within the sentence (e.g., “A is injecting B,” “A is injected by B”). When subsequently required to choose between 2 pictorial representations (i.e., character A as active, character B as active), participants were able, overall, to identify the correct images for both active and passive conditions beyond chance expectations (when averaged over all experiments). As expected, participants also took longer to respond to passive than active sentences. In sum, the present research demonstrates that people are able to process the meaning of word combinations that they are not consciously aware of seeing.

Item Type:	Article
Schools and Departments:	School of Psychology > Psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion
Depositing User:	Lene Hyltoft
Date Deposited:	06 Aug 2015 14:24
Last Modified:	02 Jul 2019 22:35
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/56023

View download statistics for this item

📧 Request an update