![]() ![]() “It’s both the time between the prime and the target, which we’ve found has to be a tenth of a second or less, and the time pressure on the subject to respond rapidly. Time is the key element in the new research, making it possible to easily replicate the effects of subliminal activation in any laboratory. Greenwald said similar work by researchers in the past has occasionally showed some subliminal influence, but those findings have proved nearly impossible to reproduce. This showed that the subjects were perceiving the priming words unconsciously and that this was affecting their identification of the target words When subjects were time-pressured, the error rate was sharply increased if the prime word differed in meaning from the target word. Using this method, which Greenwald calls the response window technique, he was able to measure the effect of the priming word on correctly identifying the target word by calculating the error rates when the two words agreed or disagreed. To test the mind’s ability to receive a subliminal message, Greenwald and his associates obliged the subjects to make faster choices and identify words in four-tenths of a second. Most subjects were able to correctly identify target words in five-tenths to six-tenths of a second with an average error rate of about 5 percent. The researchers controlled the amount of time subjects were exposed to the subliminal priming word and the interval between the priming word and the target word. On others they didn’t - a female priming name preceded a male target name. On some trials the priming and target words agreed - such as two female names. Each sandwich was composed of a string of 15 consonants, then a priming word - again either male/female or pleasant/unpleasant - and then another string of 15 consonants. Just prior to seeing each target word, the subjects were exposed to the subliminal sandwich, which also flashed on the monitor. The words briefly flashed on a computer monitor one at a time, every few seconds, and subjects identified them by pressing keys on a keyboard. The subjects were asked to identify nearly 500 target words as either male or female names or as pleasant or unpleasant. ![]() Greenwald and co-authors Sean Draine, a UW doctoral candidate, and Richard Abrams, a former UW graduate student, developed a “subliminal sandwich” technique to test unconscious cognition on more than 300 volunteer subjects. This is something that advertisers have sometimes been accused of, even though it’s rarely done - and, when done, is fully detectable on videotape.” People have been afraid that those images might contain subliminal messages that they couldn’t detect. ![]() ![]() “The techniques we are using in our laboratory are not that different from the highly edited images put on television. “In addition, the influence of a subliminal message is fleeting, lasting only a brief flicker of time, perhaps as little as one-tenth of a second.” “What we see indicates that unconscious cognition is capable of only simple mental operations compared to the powers of conscious thought,” said Greenwald. The techniques, developed by a UW research team headed by psychology professor Anthony Greenwald, provide the clearest window yet into the operation of the unconscious mind. Ever since a New York motivational researcher claimed 40 years ago that he could persuade drive-in theater patrons to purchase popcorn and Coca-Cola with “hidden” visual messages, psychologists have been searching for reproducible evidence that subliminal visual messages can influence human behavior, thought processes and decision-making.įinding such evidence has proven elusive, but researchers from the University of Washington, writing in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science, report that they have developed the first reproducible method demonstrating that subliminal messages do affect human cognition. ![]()
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