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Your Unconscious Knows Your Name

One's own name constitutes a unique part of conscious awareness – but does this also hold true for unconscious processing? The present study shows that the own name has the power to bias a person's actions unconsciously even in conditions that render any other name ineffective. Participant...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Pfister, Roland, Pohl, Carsten, Kiesel, Andrea, Kunde, Wilfried
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3293799/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22403652
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032402
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author Pfister, Roland
Pohl, Carsten
Kiesel, Andrea
Kunde, Wilfried
author_facet Pfister, Roland
Pohl, Carsten
Kiesel, Andrea
Kunde, Wilfried
author_sort Pfister, Roland
collection PubMed
description One's own name constitutes a unique part of conscious awareness – but does this also hold true for unconscious processing? The present study shows that the own name has the power to bias a person's actions unconsciously even in conditions that render any other name ineffective. Participants judged whether a letter string on the screen was a name or a non-word while this target stimulus was preceded by a masked prime stimulus. Crucially, the participant's own name was among these prime stimuli and facilitated reactions to following name targets whereas the name of another, yoked participant did not. Signal detection results confirmed that participants were not aware of any of the prime stimuli, including their own name. These results extend traditional findings on “breakthrough” phenomena of personally relevant stimuli to the domain of unconscious processing. Thus, the brain seems to possess adroit mechanisms to identify and process such stimuli even in the absence of conscious awareness.
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spelling pubmed-32937992012-03-08 Your Unconscious Knows Your Name Pfister, Roland Pohl, Carsten Kiesel, Andrea Kunde, Wilfried PLoS One Research Article One's own name constitutes a unique part of conscious awareness – but does this also hold true for unconscious processing? The present study shows that the own name has the power to bias a person's actions unconsciously even in conditions that render any other name ineffective. Participants judged whether a letter string on the screen was a name or a non-word while this target stimulus was preceded by a masked prime stimulus. Crucially, the participant's own name was among these prime stimuli and facilitated reactions to following name targets whereas the name of another, yoked participant did not. Signal detection results confirmed that participants were not aware of any of the prime stimuli, including their own name. These results extend traditional findings on “breakthrough” phenomena of personally relevant stimuli to the domain of unconscious processing. Thus, the brain seems to possess adroit mechanisms to identify and process such stimuli even in the absence of conscious awareness. Public Library of Science 2012-03-05 /pmc/articles/PMC3293799/ /pubmed/22403652 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032402 Text en Pfister et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Pfister, Roland
Pohl, Carsten
Kiesel, Andrea
Kunde, Wilfried
Your Unconscious Knows Your Name
title Your Unconscious Knows Your Name
title_full Your Unconscious Knows Your Name
title_fullStr Your Unconscious Knows Your Name
title_full_unstemmed Your Unconscious Knows Your Name
title_short Your Unconscious Knows Your Name
title_sort your unconscious knows your name
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3293799/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22403652
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032402
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