I post this a lot...it's a post by SDStudent, a really helpful one:
It was called something like Abstracts (research) on how photoreading might really work.
<<Clinique de Neurologie et de Neuropsychologie, Hopital de la Salpetriere, Paris.
The sudden resurgence of precise information some time after the failure of its recall (memory block) suggests the intervention of unconscious processes. In normal subjects the experimental demonstration of such processes meets with methodological snags. They are avoided in patients with a pure amnesic syndrome because retrograde amnesia produces many instances of missing memories, while anterograde amnesia prevents the patient from consciously thinking about it. Three patients with a pure amnesic syndrome were submitted to 4 interviews over 12 days on 3 topics concerning places and itineraries that were very familiar before the disease, and a shocking event of their life. Retrieved memories were compared to those of normal matched subjects. The results showed a dramatic increase for memories of places and itineraries over sessions, and the absence of improvement of autobiographical memories. These findings underline the role of the activation of unconscious processes in recall and the different status of semantic and episodic memory.
Unconscious learning during anaesthesia.
Anaesthesia. 1993 Mar;48(3):275
Jelicic M, De Roode A, Bovill JG, Bonke B.
Department of Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Forty-three surgical patients were, during general anaesthesia, presented (via headphones) with either statements about common facts of some years ago (group A), or new verbal associations, i.e. the names of fictitious, nonfamous people (group B). None had any recall of intra-operative events. In a postoperative test of indirect memory, patients in group A answered more questions about the 'common facts' correctly than those in group B (p < 0.005), which reflects the activation of pre-existing knowledge. Furthermore, patients in group B designated more 'nonfamous names' as famous (thus falsely attributing fame) than patients in group A (p < 0.001), which demonstrates that information-processing during anaesthesia can also take place as unconscious learning.
The effects of conscious and subconscious processing of hostility- or friendliness-related words on the personality impression of others].
: Shinrigaku Kenkyu 1989 Apr;60(1):38-44 [Article in Japanese]
Ikegami T, Kawaguchi J.
Aichi University of Education.
Four experiments were conducted to investigate how the prior processing of trait relevant information influenced upon the impression formation. Twenty university students participated in each experiment. First subjects performed a cognitive task in which they processed hostility (Exp. I, II) or friendliness (Exp. III, IV) related words, consciously (Exp. I, III) or subconsciously (Exp. II, IV). In another ostensibly unrelated task, subjects rated a stimulus person on several trait scales based on an ambiguous behavioral description, regarding to hostility (Exp. I, II) or friendliness (Exp. III, IV). It was shown that the more hostility words subjects processed either consciously or subconsciously, the more extreme and negative ratings they yielded. As for friendliness words, however, such effects were found only when they were subconsciously processed, not when they were consciously processed. It was argued that conscious processing was affected by positiveness or negativeness of trait words, but subconscious processing was not.
Unconscious processing of dichoptically masked words.
Mem Cognit. 1990 Jul;18(4):428-9
Greenwald AG, Klinger MR, Liu TJ.
In three experiments, the subjects' task was to decide whether each of a series of words connoted something good (e.g., fame, comedy, rescue) or bad (stress, detest, malaria). One-half second before the presentation of each such target word, an evaluatively polarized priming word was presented briefly to the nondominant eye and was masked dichoptically by either the rapidly following (Experiment 1) or simultaneous (Experiments 2 and 3) presentation of a random letter-fragment pattern to the dominant eye. (The effectiveness of the masking procedure was demonstrated by the subjects' inability to discriminate the left vs. right position of a test series of words.) In all experiments, significant masked priming effects were obtained; evaluative decisions to congruent masked prime-target combinations (such as a positive masked prime followed by a positive target) were significantly faster than those to incongruent (e.g., negative prime/positive target) or noncongruent (e.g., neutral prime/positive target) combinations. Also, in two of the three experiments, when subjects were at chance accuracy in discriminating word position, their position judgments were nevertheless significantly influenced by the irrelevant semantic content (LEFT vs. RIGHT) of the masked position-varying words. The series of experiments demonstrated that two very different tasks--speeded judgment of evaluative meaning and nonspeeded judgment of word position--yielded statistically significant and replicable influences of the semantic content of apparently undetectable words. Coupled with previous research by others using the lexical decision task, these findings converge in establishing the reliability of the empirical phenomenon of semantic processing of words that are rendered undetectable by dichoptic pattern masking.
Evidence of unconscious semantic processing from a forced error situation.
Br J Psychol 1984 Aug;75 ( Pt 3):305-14
Groeger JA.
A study was carried out to determine whether subjects extracted information from words presented below their recognition and awareness thresholds. A series of target words was used to generate the word matrix, which was a set of 24 words related to the target in specified ways. Following subthreshold exposure of a target word, subjects chose the word they thought had been shown from the word matrix for that particular target. It was held that the alternative chosen was a function of the type of processing the target was receiving. Results showed that structural analysis of the target predominated below recognition threshold, whereas semantic analysis predominated below awareness threshold.>>
Hope this helped.
-Ramon http://razor.ramon.com
