Imaging Unconscious Semantic Priming

Stanislas Dehaene, Lionel Naccache, Gurvan Le Clec H, Etienne Koechlin, Michael Mueller, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Pierre-Francois van de Moortele, Denis Le Bihan · Nature · 1998 · neuroscience · 10.1038/26967 · record dehaene1998-unconscious-priming
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 coded 'fmri' because the imaging is the paper's headline contribution, but the study is genuinely three-method (behavioural RT, 128-channel ERP/LRP, and event-related fMRI) — the single-value enum cannot express that. Superscript reference markers survive extraction as digits glued to words (e.g. 'masked priming1,2'), and the quotes preserve them verbatim. The paper reports an internal cross-method replication ('Response times recorded during fMRI recording replicated the prime–target congruity effect'), but no external replication, so replication status is untested. The source .txt also contains the start of an unrelated following Nature letter (Lomelí et al.); nothing was quoted from it. 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. Update, 15 September 2026: EXCEPTION, measured with the merge gate's own predicate (Paper.locate): 1 quote(s) on this record are not found as one exact string in the current staged text - content_tags.statistics[2].evidence. The sentence above does not hold for them as written. Where a row records why - the quote is grounded in another copy of the paper, joins two passages with an ellipsis, or differs from the staged text by extraction noise - that note stays on the row.
Some words in these quotes contain the wrong character. The PDF this text was extracted from substituted 33 characters inside a word — a currency sign or a stray accent where a letter pair belongs, as in signi¢cantly for significantly, or a single ligature glyph, as in confidence. They are valid characters in the wrong place, so they survive every encoding check. The quotes keep them for the same reason as above, and a search of this page will not find the affected words.
1 quote on this page was cut from a different copy of this article. This project holds two extractions of this paper: the plain text every other quote here is anchored in, and the publisher’s own HTML edition, which we are not licensed to republish. It is verbatim in the second and cannot be found in the first — not because the tagging is wrong, but because the extraction damaged the passage: a page number dropped into the middle of a number, a formula moved out of its sentence, a ligature where two letters belong. The record names the copy for each one. The quote is the paper’s; the extraction is not.
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.
Other fields define these differently the same word, defined another way in another discipline
false-discovery-rate 6 fields · awareness 3 fields · fmri 2 fields · semantic 2 fields

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 6 concept tags on this paper, 3 are grounded in a quoted sentence. 3 carry the tagger's gloss of what the term means in this paper, which is not something the article can license.
unconscious priming masked priming semantic processing prime motor cortex awareness unconscious semantic activation congruent motor effect-size effect size false-discovery-rate multiple comparisons mean average of t-test t-tests fmri

Legend

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
methodmethodhow the paper produced its evidence
phenomenonphenomenonthe effect or regularity under study
sensesensesa distinct use of a term, quoted where the paper fixes it
transfertransfersa method or concept carried in from another field

The paper

The full text is not reproduced here. This article is not cleared for redistribution, so the page carries the tag layer only. Its evidence sentences are withheld; the grounding status remains with each tag, and the article itself is at https://doi.org/10.1038/26967. The reading view exists for the papers whose licence permits it.

Every tag on this page

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

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.

This record holds no mechanisms. A layer is empty when the tagger recorded nothing in it — which is not the same as the paper having nothing to record.

facettagfieldconf.whose words
claim_typeexistence
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_typethe paper's words
phenomenonmasked semantic priming of number comparison
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
phenomenonthe paper's words
methodfmri
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: fmri
methodthe paper's words
limitationsERP localisation of the covert priming effect is spatially imprecise, which is why fMRI was added
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[0]the tagger's words
limitationsThe haemodynamic measure is too coarse to resolve the small activation delays produced by masked priming
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[1]the tagger's words
transfersthe lateralized readiness potential, an ERP measure of covert motor preparation, rebuilt in the haemodynamic signal and renamed the lateralized BOLD response
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
transfers[0]0.85the tagger's words
controlsthe number-comparison task performed twice by every subject, in counterbalanced order
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
eliminates: an order effect between the two runs, and between-subject differences, at once - each subject does both and the order is balanced across them · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[0]0.85the tagger's words
conceptsprime
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: prime
concepts[3]0.95the paper's words
conceptsmotor cortex
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: motor cortex
concepts[4]0.95the paper's words
conceptsawareness
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: awareness
concepts[5]0.95the paper's words
sensesTHE INVISIBLE PRIME APPLIES THE TASK INSTRUCTIONS, WHICH IS A STRONGER CLAIM THAN SEMANTIC ACTIVATION. `the interference between prime and target can be attributed to a covert, prime-induced activation of motor cortex, a response bias that must be overcome in incongruent trials. This indicates that the prime was unconsciously processed according to task instructions, all the way down to the motor system.` The unseen numeral was compared to 5 and a hand was prepared. Most masked-priming records in this corpus argue about whether MEANING was reached; this one argues that a RULE was executed on something nobody saw
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[0]0.95the tagger's words
sensesAND THE CONTROL ANSWERS THE OBJECTION THAT WEAKENED AN EARLIER RESULT IN THIS SAME CORPUS: `the entire response time distribution was shifted by ~24 ms in incongruent trials compared with congruent trials. Thus, there was no evidence that the effect was found in only A small proportion of subjects or A small number of trials with a distinct distribution of response times.` buchner2003 - tagged three records ago - reports that Driver & Baylis's cross-modal effect `was observed only for a small subgroup of 14 (out of 24) participants`, which `leaves some uncertainty as to the reality` of it. This paper pre-empts exactly that, with a distributional argument rather than an average, and reports that all 12 subjects showed the effect
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: the staged text carries a COMPARISON/APPROXIMATION OPERATOR REPLACED BY PUNCTUATION: the paper's “~24 ms” is staged as “,24 ms”. Not a spurious space and not a reversal - the character is REPLACED and the result is still grammatical, so it reads as a stray comma rather than as damage. Settled from the paper's own preceding sentence, which gives “average 24 ms, s.d. 13.5 ms”, and the same paragraph carries “(P , 0:0001)” for “P < 0.0001”. The tag's own label already reads “~24 ms”, so the reading was right and only the evidence is damaged; the quote is verbatim against the staged text and no re-slice avoids the character.
senses[1]0.95the tagger's words
sensesTHE WHOLE PROCESSING CHAIN IS PLACED OUTSIDE AWARENESS IN ONE SENTENCE: `Quotation withheld.` Three stages, named in order, and the claim is that none of them requires consciousness. That is the sentence the rest of this corpus's masked-priming records are arguing with - Holcomb2005 asks whether the N400 stage is automatic, Huang2018 restricts affective primacy to face stimuli, Kouider2008 asks about levels of processing. Here all three levels are claimed at once, from a single 43 ms numeral
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[2]0.95the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → studies of masked-face modulation of amygdala activity (refs 11, 12: Whalen et al. 1998; Morris, Öhman & Dolan 1998)
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[0]the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → prior imaging of unconscious cerebral processing (refs 13, 14: Berns, Cohen & Mintun 1997; Sahraie et al. 1997)
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[1]the tagger's words
concept_edgesprime —causes→ motor cortex
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: THE PAPER'S CENTRAL CLAIM AND ITS MOST SURPRISING ONE: an unreportable stimulus produces measurable motor activation. 'covert' and 'can be attributed to' are both in the quote - the motor activation is measured, and its attribution to the prime is the inference. Weight 0.9 rather than 0.95 for that second half.
also in: prime · motor cortex
concept_edges[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsthe unseen prime modulates brain activation and congruent responses
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[1]the tagger's words
content_tagseffect-size
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: THE MATHS LAYER OF THE STAGED TEXT WAS MOJIBAKE AND HAS BEEN REPAIRED. This paper's extraction rendered '=' as U+00BC (the vulgar fraction one quarter) and '+' as U+00FE (thorn), so the quote read 'p ¼ 0.01' where the paper says 'p = 0.01'. It passed every check we own, because the staged text said the same wrong thing: the offsets were right and the recorded hash of the staged text matched. Repaired only where the character stands in an operator's place - spaced, with a number after it - because the same U+00BC is a REAL QUARTER in six other papers ('a ¼ inch condenser microphone'). Original in evidence as extracted, pre-repair file in an internal file. QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Correction, 18 September 2026: only '=' and '+' were repaired. In this quote the ':' in 'P = 0:0027' is a decimal point (P = 0.0027) and still prints wrongly.
also in: effect-size
content_tags.statistics[0]0.85the tagger's words
content_tagsfalse-discovery-rate
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: QUOTE REPAIRED: the extractor split a unicode and the quote was recorded faithfully with the damage in it, which made it unanchorable. The repaired string is an EXACT SUBSTRING of the staged text - that is why it was accepted, not because a rule produced it. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.
content_tags.statistics[1]the tagger's words
content_tagst-test
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: QUOTE REPAIRED: the extractor split a all and the quote was recorded faithfully with the damage in it, which made it unanchorable. The repaired string is an EXACT SUBSTRING of the staged text - that is why it was accepted, not because a rule produced it. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.
also in: t-test
content_tags.statistics[3]the tagger's words

Interpretive choices

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