Seminar in Empirical Microeconomics Detail en

Speaker:
Shao-Min Hung (Research Visit Fellow, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan / Psychology)

Abstract:

Attention seems to constrain how we perceive the world, that is, our conscious experience. Does this attentional constraint extend to sensory information that remains unconscious to us? In this talk, I will show that attention, specifically how focused we are on a task, gates unconscious semantic processing. In a series of psychophysical experiments, we found that participants’ response to a Stroop word slowed down when a preceding unconscious prime word had an incongruent meaning. Critically, this unconscious interference occurred only when the task was word-naming (easy), but not color-naming (hard). Furthermore, in an ongoing fMRI study, we found that, in the early visual cortex, compared to an incongruent prime, a congruent prime prompted stronger target activation only in the word-naming session, showing successful registration of unconscious information. This difference disappeared in the color-naming session. Lastly, I will talk about using this paradigm to study cognitive aging in older individuals, which revealed that older individuals with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s were more susceptible to unconscious interference, potentially linked to how they used attention. Together, these results demonstrate that similar to conscious processing, unconscious processing is under attentional modulation.