Department of Psychology, Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
PLoS One. 2012;7(3):e32402. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032402. Epub 2012 Mar 5.
One's own name constitutes a unique part of conscious awareness - but does this also hold true for unconscious processing? The present study shows that the own name has the power to bias a person's actions unconsciously even in conditions that render any other name ineffective. Participants judged whether a letter string on the screen was a name or a non-word while this target stimulus was preceded by a masked prime stimulus. Crucially, the participant's own name was among these prime stimuli and facilitated reactions to following name targets whereas the name of another, yoked participant did not. Signal detection results confirmed that participants were not aware of any of the prime stimuli, including their own name. These results extend traditional findings on "breakthrough" phenomena of personally relevant stimuli to the domain of unconscious processing. Thus, the brain seems to possess adroit mechanisms to identify and process such stimuli even in the absence of conscious awareness.
一个人的名字构成了有意识意识的独特部分——但无意识处理也是如此吗？本研究表明，即使在使任何其他名字都无效的情况下，名字也有能力无意识地影响一个人的行为。参与者判断屏幕上的字母串是名字还是非单词，而这个目标刺激之前是一个掩蔽的启动刺激。关键是，参与者自己的名字在这些启动刺激中，并且促进了对后续名字目标的反应，而另一个被束缚的参与者的名字则没有。信号检测结果证实，参与者没有意识到任何启动刺激，包括他们自己的名字。这些结果将与个人相关刺激的“突破”现象的传统发现扩展到无意识处理领域。因此，即使没有意识，大脑似乎也拥有识别和处理此类刺激的熟练机制。
