Investigating commonalities between effects of unconscious priming

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulrich Ansorge, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2008 to 2012
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 60126881

The project seeks to unearth the laws governing processing of unconscious visual stimuli and the commonalities as well as the differences between different sorts of processing such stimuli with the help of masked priming. In this context, the visibility of priming stimuli (primes) is diminished by visual masks to test whether invisible primes exert an effect on the efficiency of the processing of a subsequent target. During the first grant period, we will investigate whether (a) unconscious visual words with a spatial meaning have the same effects as unconscious visual location information based on stimulus position, (b) attentional control settings could be responsible for whether or not masked stimuli will be processed, and (c) different tasks using the same unconscious visual stimuli recruit different parts of the brain. The investigations aim for behavioral and physiological effects, especially event-related potentials (ERPs).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Participating Persons: Dr. Werner Klotz; Professorin Dr. Ingrid Scharlau