1. The Role of Consciousness in Semantic Processing: Insights from Metaphorical Priming
- Author
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Saponaro, C, Crepaldi, D, Casasanto, D, Bottini, R, Saponaro, C, Crepaldi, D, Casasanto, D, and Bottini, R
- Abstract
The question of whether we can access a word’s meaning outside of awareness has been broadly debated: despite numerous studies have claimed that words can be processed up to their semantic level even if presented subliminally (e.g., Sklar et al., 2012), a growing body of studies has questioned this finding (e.g., Rabagliati et al., 2018). A recent study challenged the claim that automatic semantic activation originates unconscious verbal priming, proposing instead that associative patterns between lexical forms can drive the effect (Bottini et al., 2016). Words are related to each other not only based on their meaning but also on their orthographic or phonological features, and the statistical relationships established through language use. Hence, the priming effect occasionally found might not be driven by semantic similarity, but instead by predictive relationships between wordforms appearing in similar linguistic contexts. Within this framework, we hypothesized that full consciousness is necessary to access a semantic representation, and that a priming effect can occur outside of awareness only when two words are linguistically related. Given the fact that, usually, words that are semantically related also co-occur in language use, we exploited spatial metaphors of numerical operations to disentangle these two conditions. The concepts of addition and subtraction can be conceptually represented along two spatial axes, a vertical and a lateral one, but only the vertical mapping is encoded linguistically. We obtained a 2x2x2 design from the combination of the between-participants factor of Prime Visibility (subliminal/supraliminal levels) and the within-participants factors of Congruity (congruent/incongruent) and Axis (lateral/vertical). Sixty participants perceived consciously spatial prime words, while other sixty participants were presented with the same words outside of awareness, through a masked priming technique. Prime words could be represented along the tw
- Published
- 2022