Assessing subjective prime awareness on a trial-by-trial basis interferes with masked semantic priming effects.
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition February 1, 2023 Markus Kiefer, Marcel Harpaintner, Michaela Rohr et al.
Asking participants to rate their awareness of a briefly flashed, masked word during a semantic priming experiment changes the underlying cognitive processes. In two groups performing a lexical decision task, masked primes were shown for 20, 40, or 60 milliseconds. One group also rated prime visibility trial-by-trial using the Perceptual Awareness Scale; the other did not. Reaction-time and drift-diffusion modeling showed general priming effects on reaction time and drift rate only in the group without the rating task. In the rating group, residual priming effects appeared only on trials where participants reported seeing the prime, and affected non-decisional processing time. The concurrent rating task interferes with semantic priming, likely because it diverts attention to identifying the masked prime.