Figure 2.

Experimental design. (A–C) The colored boxes illustrate trial blocks that belong to a certain experimental condition. Lines within colored boxes stand for individual trials. The sequence of blocks over time is given from bottom left to top right. (A) The fMRI time-series for subliminal one-trial encoding entailed four blocks of four subliminal word pairs each and four blocks of four pairs of consonant strings each. Blocks of word pairs (blue) alternated with blocks of pairs of consonant strings (gray). (B) In the fMRI time-series for subliminal nine-trial encoding, the four blocks with word pairs were repeated nine times for a better encoding. Blocks with pairs of consonant strings were not repeated. These blocks were interspersed at pseudo-random positions in the time-series. (C) The test fMRI time-series embraced four conditions of four blocks each. Each block contained four trials. Condition blocks were presented in a fixed alternating sequence. (D) Half of participants were assigned to the one-trial encoding group and the other half to the nine-trial encoding group. Both groups took two experimental runs. Each run consisted of an encoding part, a 5-min encoding-test interval, and a test part.