Atas, A. , Vermeiren, A. & Cleeremans, A.
Consciousness, Cognition and Computation Group. Université Libre de Bruxelles. Bruxelles, Belgique.
Marcel (1983) showed that repeated presentations of a masked stimulus improved priming while failing to influence perceptual awareness. However, both empirical evidence (Ferrand, 1996) as well as theoretical proposals (Cleeremans et al., 2002) predict the opposite: Increasing bottom-up strength as resulting from repeated presentation associated with a short inter-stimulus interval (500 ms or less) should also result in increasing availability to awareness. Here, we tested this prediction by manipulating the number of repetitions of a masked stimulus in a numerical priming task and in two visibility tests. To explore the influence of attention, we also compared three different task contexts in which the priming trials were performed before, after or concurrently with the visibility trials. Results showed a systematic increase of awareness with the number of repetitions, in both objective and subjective tests. However, we only obtained a repetition-dependent priming effect in the concurrent condition, suggesting the crucial role of attention. The influence of top-down factors was also illustrated by significantly smaller priming in the priming-first condition vs. the visibility-first condition. Altogether, our results do not replicate the dissociation observed by Marcel and are instead suggestive that increases in bottom-up strength are associated with increases in visibility, and hence, awareness.