Subliminal semantic priming in near absence of attention: A cursor motion study Kunchen Xiao, Takashi Yamauchi ⇑ Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, Mail Stop: 4235, College Station, TX 77843-4235, USA article info Article history: Received 28 March 2015 Revised 7 August 2015 Accepted 30 September 2015 Keywords: Consciousness Attention Congruency effect Cursor motion abstract The role of attention in subliminal semantic priming remains controversial: some researchers argue that attention is necessary for subliminal semantic priming, while others suggest that subliminal semantic processing is free from the influence of attention. The present study employs a cursor motion method to measure priming and evaluate the influence of attention. Specifically, by employing a semantic priming task developed by Naccache, Blandin, and Dehaene (2002), we investigate the extent to which top-down attention influences semantic priming. Results indicate that, consistent with the Naccache et al. (2002) results, attention facilitates priming. However, inconsistent with their theory, significant priming is still observed even in near absence of attention. We sug- gest that top-down attention helps but is not necessary for subliminal semantic processing. Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction It has been debated for decades whether attention plays a fundamental role in subliminal semantic priming. A classic view is that subliminal processing is purely automatic requiring no attention (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977). For example, the gist of pictures can be understood in near absence of attention (Li, VanRullen, Koch, & Perona, 2002); when a photograph was briefly flashed unexpectedly on a screen, subjects could accurately report a summary of the photograph, even though the photograph was presented at peripheral locations with a duration as short as 30 ms. It is also found that the gender and identity of faces can be rapidly processed when there is little top-down attention (Reddy, Wilken, & Koch, 2004). In addition, in a numerical judgment task, it is found that subliminal stimuli do have influences on cognitive control even in near absence of attention (Rahnev, Huang, & Lau, 2012). However, other studies suggest that top-down attention is essential in subliminal semantic processing (Dehaene, Changeux, Naccache, Sackur, & Sergent, 2006). For example, in an ERP study, top-down attention facilitates a N400 component during semantic processing of subliminal stimuli (Kiefer & Martens, 2010). Top-down attention is also shown to be necessary for subliminal processing of spatial information; without awareness, participants can correctly report loca- tions of dots only when top-down attention is present (Hsieh, Colas, & Kanwisher, 2011). Furthermore, it is also suggested that processing the gist of natural-scenes involves top-down attention (Cohen, Alvarez, & Nakayama, 2011). One of the most-cited studies arguing for the necessity of top-down attention is a number judgment task (Naccache, Blandin, & Dehaene, 2002), where participants’ top-down attention was manipulated by occasionally presenting a visual cue (a green square) to signal an upcoming target. Participants judged whether a target digit (e.g. ‘‘9”) was larger or smaller http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.09.013 1053-8100/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: xiaokunchen@tamu.edu (K. Xiao), takashi-yamauchi@tamu.edu (T. Yamauchi). Consciousness and Cognition 38 (2015) 88–98 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog