Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 102, Issue 21, Pages 7713-7717Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0500542102
Keywords
amygdala; semantic; visual masking
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A classical but still open issue in cognitive psychology concerns the depth of subliminal processing. Can the meaning of undetected words be accessed in the absence of consciousness? Subliminal priming experiments in normal subjects have revealed only small effects whose interpretation remains controversial. Here, we provide a direct demonstration of semantic access for unseen masked words. in three epileptic patients with intracranial electrodes, we recorded brain potentials from the amygdala, a neural structure that responds to fearful or threatening stimuli presented in various modalities, including written words. We show that the subliminal presentation of emotional words modulates the activity of the amygdala at a long latency (> 800 ms). Our result indicates that subliminal words can trigger long-lasting cerebral processes, including semantic access to emotional valence.
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