Music Therapy Today - World Federation of Music Therapy

Nonconscious semantic processing of emotional words modulates conscious
Whether masked words can be processed at a semantic level remains a
controversial issue in cognitive psychology.
Although recent behavioral studies have demonstrated masked semantic
priming for number words, attempts to generalize this finding to other
categories of words have failed.
Here, as an alternative to subliminal priming, we introduce a sensitive
behavioral method to detect nonconscious semantic processing of words.
The logic of this method consists of presenting words close to the thresh-
old for conscious perception and examining whether their semantic con-
tent modulates performance in objective and subjective tasks.
Our results disclose two independent sources of modulation of the thresh-
old for access to consciousness.
First, prior conscious perception of words increases the detection rate of
the same words when they are subsequently presented with stronger
masking.
Second, the threshold for conscious access is lower for emotional words
than for neutral ones, even for words that have not been previously con-
sciously perceived, thus implying that written words can receive noncon-
scious semantic processing.
OUTDOORLINKS: Raphaël Gaillard
E-mail: raphael.gaillard(at)normalesup.org
Laurent Cohen
Odds and ends - themes and trends 449