INSERM, Department of Psychiatry, Centre Hospitalier Régional Universitaire, Strasbourg, France.
Conscious Cogn. 2013 Jun;22(2):517-27. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2013.02.010. Epub 2013 Apr 2.
Whether unconscious stimuli can modulate the preparation of a cognitive task is still controversial. Using a backward masking paradigm, we investigated whether the modulation could be observed even if the prime was made unconscious in 100% of the trials. In two behavioral experiments, subjects were instructed to initiate a phonological or semantic task on an upcoming word, following an explicit instruction and an unconscious prime. When the SOA between prime and instruction was sufficiently long (84 ms), primes congruent with the task set instruction led to speedier responses than incongruent primes. In the other condition (36 ms), no task set priming was observed. Repetition priming had the opposite tendency, suggesting the observed task set facilitation cannot be ascribed solely to perceptual repetition priming. Our results therefore confirm that unconscious information can modulate cognitive control for currently active task sets, providing sufficient time is available before the conscious decision.
无意识刺激是否可以调节认知任务的准备仍然存在争议。使用倒摄掩蔽范式，我们研究了即使在 100%的试验中使启动无意识，是否仍然可以观察到这种调节。在两个行为实验中，要求被试根据一个即将出现的单词的明确指令和无意识启动，启动语音或语义任务。当启动和指令之间的 SOA 足够长（84 毫秒）时，与任务集指令一致的启动比不一致的启动更快。在另一种情况下（36 毫秒），没有观察到任务集启动。重复启动则有相反的趋势，这表明观察到的任务集促进作用不能仅仅归因于知觉重复启动。因此，我们的结果证实，无意识信息可以调节当前活跃任务集的认知控制，只要在有意识决策之前有足够的时间。
