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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2010 Jul 11.
Published in final edited form as: Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2006 Dec;63(12):1313–1323. doi: 10.1001/archpsyc.63.12.1313

Figure 1. Experiment design.

Figure 1

The prime was presented for 16 ms at one of four positions (1.4 degrees above or below and 1.4 degrees right or left to the fixation cross). The mask (duration of presentation 250ms) was composed of three letters (M, M, E) and the target number (1 ° from the fixation cross). Those four symbols surrounded the prime number without touching it.

In the first experiment, referred to as the “priming experiment”, subjects were asked to compare each target number with 5, pressing the right-hand key as fast as possible for numbers larger than 5 and the left hand key for numbers smaller than 5.

The second experiment aimed at measuring the consciousness threshold in two different ways. We measured an objective visibility threshold by examining subjects’ ability to perform the number comparison task on the prime. We also measured a subjective threshold by collecting introspective ratings of prime visibility, on a subjective continuous scale.