2026/01/01 by Christin Wendt, Guido Hesselmann · 1 voice
Neuroscience · #Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies #Memory Processes and Influences #Face Recognition and Perception
paper · doi:10.1525/collabra.160702
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/04/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Experiments contrasting conscious and masked stimulus processing have shaped, and continue to shape, cognitive and neurobiological theories of consciousness. However, as shown by Aru et al. (2012) the contrastive approach builds on the untenable assertion that there are no interactions among the stimulus- and response-related components of a task. While no-report paradigms avoid this violation of pure insertion, it seems necessary to understand the cognitive interactions in other paradigms where the removal of response-related components is not an option. Our research therefore started from the simple observation that report-based paradigms often qualify as dual-tasking situations. We investigated the dual-task architecture of a masked priming paradigm, where the prime’s visibility can be assessed with a subjective measure on a trial-by-trial basis. This experimental setup meets the criteria of a dual-task paradigm and our aims were twofold: to estimate the influence of response-related parameters on the masked priming effects, and to study the neural underpinnings of our dual-tasking manipulations. In a metacontrast masking experiment using event-related potentials (ERPs), participants discriminated a target stimulus by quickly pressing one of two keys, and then indicated the subjective visibility of the prime stimulus, either by vocal response or by key-press (factor “modality”). The visibility measure was a variant of the perceptual awareness scale (PAS) with either two or four items (factor “complexity”). Our behavioral data show typical dual-task costs in RTs, and in line with accounts of interference and shared resources, unimodal and high complexity conditions resulted in prolonged RTs. Contrary to our predictions, response priming effects were larger in the single-task than in the dual-task condition, while the dual-task manipulations did not significantly influence priming. ERPs in the preregistered P3b time window were comparable between the single and dual task conditions. The unimodal dual-task conditions were associated with a slightly larger P3b than the cross-modal conditions. Taken together, our findings highlight the need to carefully take dual-task characteristics into account when designing masked response priming paradigms and they point to promising new directions for research on masked priming (IPA retrievable under: https://osf.io/ds2w5).