With @deouell.bsky.social and Ran Hassin. Read more in the open-access version of the paper:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Negative words are detected *less* often when you focus on another task, regardless of task difficulty, the specific word set, or potentially confounding features. The decision of the system to disengage from a primary (visual, in our case) task might not conform to our conscious intuition.
We designed a dual task in which dozens of spoken words evade consciousness, but without degrading the words - if you knew they were coming, you would've heard them. Which features mitigate this "inattentional deafness" that is so familiar in daily lives?
We found that, while low-level/phonetic features, and pronunciation intelligibility play a large role in determining awareness, word valence plays a role too - suggesting semantic information is prioritized before conscious awareness. And not in the direction you'd think!
New in Psychological Science! We've been studying visual non-conscious prioritization processes for decades, but not a lot is known about non-conscious speech processing. Does it conform to the same principles, despite the very different way it functions?
#consciousness #psychscisky #PsychSky
An extraordinary experience!! Huge thanks to all mentors and organizers.
First paper is now out in Cortex! We find behavioral and neural evidence for non-conscious speech processing, using a new dual-task paradigm that creates repetitive occurrences of in attentional deafness without masking or degrading stimuli. @deouell.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...