Zhou Fanzhi Anita, Davis Greg
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2012 Jan;74(1):105-14. doi: 10.3758/s13414-011-0221-8.
Unconscious stimuli activate task sets, mental programs that orchestrate performance of complex tasks, but the role of attention in such effects has not been addressed. In previous studies, unconscious prime stimuli appeared at attended locations and were explicitly specified in the task instructions; spatial attention to the prime and/or a specific conscious attentional set may thus be required for such unconscious activation to arise. In the present experiments, a learning phase established associations between unconscious prime stimuli and performance of two tasks. These associations influenced task performance in a subsequent test phase, even though the primes were not specified in current task instructions. This is the first demonstration that unconscious stimuli can prime task sets independently of a current attentional set that specifies stimulus-task mappings. Such priming was not influenced by spatial attention cues, in contrast to clear attention influences in comparison trials that mimicked conditions employed by previous studies.
无意识刺激会激活任务集，即协调复杂任务执行的心理程序，但注意力在这种效应中的作用尚未得到探讨。在先前的研究中，无意识启动刺激出现在被注意的位置，并在任务指令中明确指明；因此，这种无意识激活可能需要对启动刺激和/或特定的有意识注意集进行空间注意。在本实验中，一个学习阶段建立了无意识启动刺激与两项任务表现之间的关联。这些关联在随后的测试阶段影响了任务表现，尽管启动刺激未在当前任务指令中指明。这是首次证明无意识刺激可以独立于指定刺激-任务映射的当前注意集来启动任务集。与模仿先前研究中所采用条件的比较试验中明显的注意力影响不同，这种启动不受空间注意线索的影响。
