Division of Experimental Psychology and Neuropsychology, Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Muesmattstrasse 45, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
Conscious Cogn. 2011 Sep;20(3):928-35. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.03.018. Epub 2011 Apr 9.
Recent evidence suggests that consciousness of encoding is not necessary for the rapid formation of new semantic associations. We investigated whether unconsciously formed associations are as semantically precise as would be expected for associations formed with consciousness of encoding during episodic memory formation. Pairs of faces and written occupations were presented subliminally for unconscious associative encoding. Five minutes later, the same faces were presented suprathreshold for the cued unconscious retrieval of face-occupation associations. Retrieval instructions required participants to classify the presented individuals according to their putative (1) regularity of income, (2) length of education, and (3) creativity value of occupational activity. The three instructions yielded more classifications consistent with a person's occupation if the person had been subliminally presented with his written occupation versus a meaningless word (control condition). This suggests that consciousness is not necessary to encode, long-term store, and retrieve semantically precise associations between primarily unrelated items.
最近的证据表明，编码意识对于新语义联想的快速形成并不是必需的。我们研究了无意识形成的联想是否与在情节记忆形成过程中通过编码意识形成的联想一样具有语义准确性。面孔和书面职业的配对以潜意识的方式呈现，以进行联想编码。五分钟后，同样的面孔以阈上的方式呈现，以提示无意识地检索面孔-职业联想。检索指令要求参与者根据他们推测的以下三个方面对呈现的个体进行分类：(1)收入规律，(2)受教育程度，以及(3)职业活动的创造性价值。如果一个人以前曾被潜意识地呈现过他的书面职业而不是一个无意义的单词（对照条件），那么这三个指令会产生更多与一个人的职业一致的分类。这表明意识不是编码、长期存储和检索主要不相关项目之间语义准确的联想所必需的。
