Aj. Lambert et Al. Sumich, SPATIAL ORIENTING CONTROLLED WITHOUT AWARENESS - A SEMANTICALLY BASEDIMPLICIT LEARNING EFFECT, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology, 49(2), 1996, pp. 490-518
Three experiments tested whether spatial attention can be influenced b
y 1 predictive relation between incidental information and the locatio
n of target events. Subjects performed a simple dot detection task; 60
0 msec prior to each target a word was presented briefly 5 degrees to
the left or right of fixation. There was a predictive relationship bet
ween the semantic category (living or non-living) of the words and tar
get location. However, subjects were instructed to ignore the words, a
nd a post-experiment questionnaire confirmed that they remained unawar
e of the word-target relationship. In all three experiments, given som
e practice on the task, response times were faster when targets appear
ed at likely (p = 0.8), compared to unlikely (p = 0.2) locations, in r
elation to lateral word category Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed that th
is effect was driven by semantic encoding of the irrelevant words, and
not by repetition of individual stimuli. Theoretical implications of
this finding are discussed.