Fig. 1.

Experimental design. (a) In Experiment 1, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to suppress prime pictures. CFS is an interocular suppression technique whereby two different images are presented at the same time, one to each eye (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005). Eye dominance was assessed with the Miles test. We presented a low-luminance, low-contrast version of the prime stimulus to the participant’s nondominant eye and a dynamic, high-contrast random-noise pattern—changing every 100 ms—to the dominant eye. This ensured that participants perceived only the dynamic random-dot pattern, while the prime did not reach consciousness. Participants wore red/green anaglyph glasses that allowed for dioptic presentation of the images. Prime stimuli were restricted to the green RGB channel, whereas the high-contrast random patterns were restricted to the red RGB channel. (b) In Experiment 2, we used backward masking (BM) to render the pictures invisible. A black-and-white backward mask was generated by using the same algorithm that was used to generate the high-contrast random-noise patterns for CFS. (c) Examples of the primes used