Attentional Modulation of Unconscious ‘‘Automatic’’ Processes: Evidence from Event-related Potentials in a Masked Priming Paradigm

Kiefer, Brendel · · neuroscience · record Kiefernd-attentional-modulation-of-unconscious-automa
tag layer · index · concepts · authors · עברית
Where this record's text came from. faceted 2026-08 by reading the locally held text (pdftext); every evidence string verified as an exact substring of that text before merging. Method is tagged electrophysiology because scalp ERP recording is the decisive measure, but the design is equally a behavioural lexical-decision experiment (RT and error rates) - the paper's own point is that the two measures dissociate. The supplied file has no year, venue or DOI in the header block; the running head inside the text identifies it as Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18:2, 184-198, but that lies in the page-furniture rather than in a quotable claim. Replication status is untested for the novel attention claim, even though the paper's SOA effect replicates earlier work (recorded as a claim_relation). 2026-08-19 and 2026-08-25 schema-0.3 passes: every quote verified as an exact substring of the staged text and anchored at merge time; concept terms verified present; every edge endpoint an existing node.
How to read this page. The article itself is not reproduced here — this paper is not cleared for redistribution, so what follows is the tag layer alone. The evidence sentences are withheld with the article. The table at the foot lists every tag the record carries; each row names the facet it belongs to, and the whose words column says whether the tag records the paper's own wording or the tagger's sentence about the paper. Every tag links to each other paper in the corpus carrying it. The machine-readable edition of the same thing is the TEI file beside this one, where the tags live in standOff, and the article is at its publisher via the link below. When we have changed our mind. Some entries in the table begin with a word in capitals and the reason for it. EVIDENCE CORRECTED — the finding still stands, but we had quoted the wrong sentence from the paper, and the quotation has been replaced with the right one. RETRACTED — the entry itself was wrong; it stays on the page, marked, with the reason, rather than being deleted. WITHDRAWN AND REPLACED — the entry was wrong, and a corrected version of it appears in the entries below. Each mark carries its own reason, in brackets, because the reasons differ from one entry to the next. An entry we have WITHDRAWN is removed from this page and kept in the record, with its reason. A line reading Audit and a date is a later re-reading of the entry against its whole sentence: DOUBTFUL means it was kept, and the reason says what is loose about it. Quotation marks inside the tagger's sentence. Where a tag is the tagger's own sentence, a phrase in quotation marks inside it is borrowed from the paper — the tagger's wording around it is not. The paper's own sentence is the evidence quote for that row; on this page it is withheld with the article, and the article is at its publisher. Nothing inside quotation marks anywhere on this page is ours: if it is quoted, it is the paper's. Whose words a concept carries. A concept entry records a term the paper itself uses, so the term, the sense given for it, and its evidence are the paper's own words, quoted where the paper fixes them. This is the opposite of a sense entry in the tag table, which is the tagger's sentence about how the paper uses a term. Where a concept entry could not be grounded in the paper's words, the entry says so on its own row.

Tags on this paper

Every tag the record carries, each linking to every other paper in the corpus that carries it. A tag appears here whether or not its words occur in the article — the spans below are only the ones a sentence in this paper licenses. Of the 4 concept tags on this paper, all 4 are grounded in a quoted sentence. All carry the tagger's gloss of what the term means in this paper, which is not something the article can license.
automatic processes temporal attention masked priming N400 Temporal attention amplifies the activation of the masked prime's stimulus representation, and this amplification is what allows an unconsciously perceived prime to trigger the automatic semantic process indexed by the N400 Attentional amplification acts on conscious and unconscious stimuli alike, so attention and awareness are separable A temporal window of attention opened around the predicted target boosts processing of primes falling close to it in time semantic priming masked priming procedure N400 priming effect cue prime interval stimulus onset asynchrony SOA cue relevance N400 amplitude objective measure of prime identification RT ER ANOVA Repeated-measures ANOVAs F-test / main effect post hoc multiple comparison test Fisher’s LSD post hoc tests Huynh-Feldt correction for sphericity degrees of freedom were adjusted according to the method of Huynh-Feldt signal detection sensitivity (d-prime) regression a regression analysis on masked priming effects between-subjects factor in mixed ANOVA entered as a between-subject variable electrophysiology

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relation to other workclaim_relationshow this paper stands to another: agrees, contradicts, extends, qualifies
claim typeclaim_typethe shape of the claim: existence, mechanism, method, critique, prediction, null
concept edgeconcept_edgesan asserted relation between two concepts, with the sentence asserting it
conceptconceptsan idea the paper works with, quoted where the paper uses it
content tagcontent_tagsa finding, definition, quantity, statistic or variable named in the paper
controlcontrolsan experiment run to eliminate a rival explanation
limitationlimitationswhat the paper says its evidence cannot support
mechanismmechanismshow the reported effect is said to come about
methodmethodhow the paper produced its evidence
phenomenonphenomenonthe effect or regularity under study
sensesensesa distinct use of a term, quoted where the paper fixes it

The paper

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Every tag on this page

claim_relations 3 · claim_type 1 · concept_edges 1 · concepts 4 · content_tags 32 · controls 2 · limitations 2 · mechanisms 3 · method 1 · phenomenon 1 · senses 3

Relations on this page carry a quotation for the claim. Where a relation was separately evidenced — and so tested against the vocabulary for its type — the row says so; none of 1 relation here carry that mark. The rest are the tagger’s reading of the sentence quoted beside them.

facettagfieldconf.whose words
claim_typemechanism
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claim_typethe paper's words
phenomenonmasked semantic priming (N400)
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phenomenonthe paper's words
methodelectrophysiology
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methodthe paper's words
mechanismsmechanisms
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mechanisms[0]the tagger's words
mechanismsmechanisms
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mechanisms[1]the tagger's words
mechanismsmechanisms
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mechanisms[2]the tagger's words
limitationsThe cueing manipulation may have been too weak to fully disengage temporal attention from the prime, which could explain why behavioural priming was unaffected.
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limitations[0]the tagger's words
limitationsSome backward priming from target to prime cannot be entirely ruled out in Experiment 2.
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limitations[1]the tagger's words
controlsa CONTROL EXPERIMENT identical to Experiment 1 except that the cue stimulus was not task-relevant and did not direct attention
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eliminates: that the modulation follows from the cue's physical presence rather than from the attention it directs · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[0]0.95the tagger's words
controlsfiller trials at an intermediate cue-prime interval were included
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eliminates: that subjects learn the trial-length structure and prepare differently for short and long intervals · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[1]0.95the tagger's words
conceptsautomatic processes
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concepts[0]0.95the paper's words
conceptstemporal attention
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concepts[1]0.85the paper's words
conceptsmasked priming
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concepts[2]0.95the paper's words
conceptsN400
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also in: N400
concepts[3]0.95the paper's words
sensesTHE DEFINITIONAL CLAIM IS QUOTED HERE VERBATIM AND THEN CONTRADICTED BY THE SAME PAPER. `Quotation withheld (Posner & Snyder, 1975).` If independence from attention is what makes a process automatic, and the process turns out not to be independent of attention, then either it is not automatic or the definition is wrong. The paper takes the second option and keeps the word - which is precisely the move this corpus exists to make visible, and it is made in an introduction without comment
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senses[0]0.95the tagger's words
sensesTHE RESULT, AND `PREREQUISITE` IS A STRONGER WORD THAN `MODULATES`: `Quotation withheld` Not amplified, not enhanced - required. Without attention in the prime's time window there is no masked N400 priming at all. neely1977 built a design to separate the automatic component from the attentional one; this says the separation does not hold at the boundary
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senses[1]0.95the tagger's words
sensesAND THE CONTROL THAT MAKES IT INTERESTING IS ONE CLAUSE IN THE HYPOTHESIS: masked priming is amplified when attention is directed to the stimulus stream in the prime's time window, `even in the absence of any prime awareness.` Attention moves; awareness stays at zero. Without that clause the result reads as `attending made the prime visible` - a different and far less interesting paper. Same manoeuvre as marcel1983's second mask and eckstein2007's awareness measures. Sixth record running where the instrument turns out to be part of the phenomenon, and the first where the thing being modulated is the definition itself
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senses[2]0.85the tagger's words
claim_relationsextends → Naccache, Blandin & Dehaene (2002)
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claim_relations[0]the tagger's words
claim_relationscontradicts → Schneider & Shiffrin (1977); Posner & Snyder (1975)
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claim_relations[1]the tagger's words
claim_relationsreplicates → Deacon et al. (2000); Kiefer & Spitzer (2000); Brown & Hagoort (1993)
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claim_relations[2]the tagger's words
concept_edgestemporal attention —causes→ N400
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direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.95 · direction on the measure (stated by the tagger, no quotation): increases · note: 'PREREQUISITE' IS WHY THIS IS 0.95 AND WHY 'increases' UNDERSTATES IT. The enforced axis vocabulary offers increases / reduces / eliminates / no-change, and the claim here is stronger than any of them: without temporal attention the effect does not occur. The nearest available value is 'increases' and it is recorded with that gap stated rather than papered over. A fifth value - 'is-required-for' - would be the honest one, and that goes to Shir with the other schema items rather than being invented here. Both endpoints named as words, the sentence is a results statement, no hedge to preserve.
concept_edges[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsANOVA
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also in: ANOVA
content_tags.statistics[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsF-test / main effect
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content_tags.statistics[1]the tagger's words
content_tagspost hoc multiple comparison test
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content_tags.statistics[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsHuynh-Feldt correction for sphericity
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content_tags.statistics[3]the tagger's words
content_tagssignal detection sensitivity (d-prime)
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content_tags.statistics[4]the tagger's words
content_tagsregression
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also in: regression
content_tags.statistics[5]the tagger's words
content_tagsbetween-subjects factor in mixed ANOVA
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content_tags.statistics[6]the tagger's words
content_tagsThe masked N400 priming effect was strongest when the cue interval and the SOAs were short.
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content_tags.findings[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsTemporal attention to the prime is a prerequisite for masked N400 priming.
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content_tags.findings[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsWith a task-irrelevant cue, N400 priming was considerably reduced and no longer modulated by the cue-prime interval.
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content_tags.findings[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsMasked behavioural priming was significant but did not vary with the cue-prime interval.
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content_tags.findings[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsPrime visibility was at chance for the analysed participants, supporting the claim that the primes were unconscious.
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content_tags.findings[4]the tagger's words
content_tagsRegression found no significant correlation between priming effects and prime identification scores.
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content_tags.findings[5]the tagger's words
content_tagssemantic priming
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content_tags.definitions[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsmasked priming procedure
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content_tags.definitions[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsN400 priming effect
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content_tags.definitions[2]the tagger's words
content_tagscue prime interval
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content_tags.definitions[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsstimulus onset asynchrony
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content_tags.definitions[4]the tagger's words
content_tagsSOA
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also in: SOA
content_tags.variables[1]the tagger's words
content_tagscue relevance
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also in: cue relevance
content_tags.variables[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsN400 amplitude
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content_tags.variables[4]the tagger's words
content_tagsobjective measure of prime identification
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content_tags.variables[6]the tagger's words
content_tagsRT
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also in: RT
content_tags.variables[8]the tagger's words
content_tagsER
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also in: ER
content_tags.variables[9]the tagger's words
content_tagsF(1,15) = 31.064, MSE = 948, p < .0001 — Main effect of semantic relatedness on lexical decision reaction time in Experiment 1
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content_tags.quantities[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsF(1,15) = 34.405, MSE = 17.83, p < .0001 — Main effect of semantic relatedness on N400 amplitude in the 400-599 msec window of Experiment 1
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content_tags.quantities[1]the tagger's words
content_tags16 subjects, mean age 25.1 years — Analysed sample of Experiment 1 after excluding three participants whose prime identification exceeded chance
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content_tags.quantities[2]the tagger's words
content_tags49.45% and 49.38% — Masked prime identification accuracy in the short and long cue-prime interval conditions, both at the 50% chance level
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content_tags.quantities[3]the tagger's words
content_tags67 msec or 200 msec — The two prime-target stimulus onset asynchronies used to track the time course of masked priming
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content_tags.quantities[4]the tagger's words
content_tags33.5 msec — Duration of the masked prime word presentation
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content_tags.quantities[5]the tagger's words
content_tags800 trials — Total trials per participant, split into five blocks of 160
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content_tags.quantities[6]the tagger's words
content_tags0.97% versus 1.79% — Lexical decision error rates for semantically related versus unrelated word pairs in Experiment 1
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content_tags.quantities[7]the tagger's words

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