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Unconscious Manipulation of Free Choice in Humans Q Consciousness and Cognition Consciousness and Cognition 15 (2006) 397–408 www.elsevier.com/locate/concog Unconscious manipulation of free choice in humans q Andrea Kiesel a,*, Annika Wagener a, Wilfried Kunde b, Joachim Hoffmann a, Andreas J. Fallgatter c, Christian Sto¨cker a a Department of Psychology, Julius-Maximilians University of Wu¨rzburg, Institut fu¨r Psychologie III, 97070 Wu¨rzburg, Germany b Department of Psychology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany c Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Julius-Maximilians University of Wu¨rzburg, Germany Received 21 January 2005 Available online 28 November 2005 Abstract Previous research has shown that subliminally presented stimuli accelerate or delay responses afforded by supraliminally presented stimuli. Our experiments extend these findings by showing that unconscious stimuli even affect free choices between responses. Thus, actions that are phenomenally experienced as freely chosen are influenced without the actor becoming aware of the manipulation. However, the unconscious influence is limited to a response bias, as participants chose the primed response only in up to 60% of the trials. LRP data in free choice trials indicate that the prime was not ineffective in trials in which participants chose the non-primed response as then it delayed performance of the incongruently primed response. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Subliminal priming; Free choice; Unconscious cognition; LRP 1. Introduction It is a lively debated issue, whether or not stimuli we are not aware of might influence our behavior. A famous example of such an unconscious effect on behavior that has almost become part of folk psychology is the so-called ‘‘drink coke/eat popcorn’’-study by James Vicary, an advertising expert, in the late 1950s (Pratkanis, 1992). He claimed to have inserted the words ‘‘drink coke’’ or ‘‘eat popcorn’’ for about 1/3 ms every 5 s into films his ‘‘participants’’ saw at a movie theater. Allegedly, over the course of 6 weeks a substan- tial increase in soft drink and popcorn consumption ensued. The ‘‘study,’’ however, was never reported in a scientific journal and although several attempts were made, the findings could never be replicated. Some years later, Vicary himself confessed in an interview that he had made up the whole story to revive his failing advertising business (Pratkanis, 1992). Despite this, the ‘‘drink coke/eat popcorn’’-study continues to haunt public opinion like other urban myths. q Parts of the data were presented at the 8th ASSC conference in Antwerp, 2004. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Kiesel). 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2005.10.002 398 A. Kiesel et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 15 (2006) 397–408 2. Subliminal priming In the scientific community a lively debate about the standards for the investigation of unconscious manipulation has evolved (cf. Holender, 1986; Reingold & Merikle, 1993; Shanks & John, 1994). Recently, the method of subliminal priming has become an often used and well-established method to investigate the influence of unconsciously seen stimuli (Damian, 2001; Dehaene et al., 1998; DellÕ Acqua & Grainger, 1999; Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996; Klotz & Neumann, 1999; Kunde, Kiesel, & Hoffmann, 2003; Neumann & Klotz, 1994). In subliminal priming experiments, participants usually perform a forced choice reaction time task with two response alternatives according to a supraliminally presented target. Prior to the target another stimulus, the so-called prime, is presented subliminally. Reaction times are decreased if the prime affords the same response as the target stimulus to which participants respond (con- gruent prime). In contrast, reaction times are increased if the prime is incongruent, i.e., if it affords anoth- er response than the target. To ensure that prime presentation is indeed subliminal, presentation time is very short, say 29 ms, and additionally the primes are masked so that the retinal afterimage is erased. Fur- thermore, the visibility of the primes is tested in an additional discrimination task often performed at the end of the experiment. So far there is compelling evidence that subliminal primes affect target-elicited response production. The present study was conducted to extend current findings by investigating whether unconscious stimuli may also affect response selection from scratch (i.e., in the absence of a response-eliciting target stimulus). There is already some evidence in the literature that let us expect that subliminal primes may influence humanÕs free choices. First, when participants perform a forced choice task, the prime congruency effect is quite often mir- rored in the error rates, that means error rates are higher for incongruent compared to congruent primes (e.g., Damian, 2001; Kunde et al., 2003). Subliminal primes may cause participants to perform the prime-associated response that is incorrect in case of incongruent primes. Further on, Klapp and Hinkley (2002, Exp. 5, see also Klapp & Haas, 2005) reported priming effects in free choice trials. However, in this study the visibility of the primes was not checked (as in the studies of Klapp & Haas, 2005) and in another experiment with similar prime presentation, participants were able to identify the prime above chance-level leading to the suspicion that priming has not been subliminal. The most compelling evidence for a biasing impact of subliminal stimuli for freely chosen actions so far comes from a study by Schlaghecken and Eimer (2004). In this study, double arrows (e.g., ) were sublim- inally presented and masked by random line patterns. In instructed trials, a target (e.g., ) followed and affor- ded a prescribed response. In other trials, a free choice signal was presented (<>) and it was up to the participants which response to carry out. Participants responded faster to prime-congruent targets than to prime-incongruent targets in instructed trials, and they preferred prime-congruent over prime-incongruent responses in free choice trials when the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between primes and target was short (16 ms). By contrast responding to prime-incongruent targets was faster and prime-incongruent responses were preferred when the SOA was long (166 ms). Recently, however, the functional mediation of priming effects with this particular stimulus material has become an issue of controversial debate. In particular it has been suggested that the untypical reversal of congruency effects with longer SOAs (superior performance in incongruent rather than congruent trials) might reflect interactions between prime-related and mask-related perceptual processes that are specific to the type of stimuli employed (Lleras & Enns, 2004; Verleger, Jaskowski, Aydemir, van der Lubbe, & Groen, 2004). Given the suspected special status of priming effects with this paradigm it seems warrant- ed to clarify if the biasing impact of subliminal stimuli on ÕfreelyÕ chosen responses holds for other types of stimulus material and masking procedure as well. Our first purpose was to obtain a positive bias on free choices with a rather long SOA between prime and target of 100 ms, which usually leads to negative priming effects for the stimulus material of Schlaghecken and Eimer (2004, see Schlaghecken & Eimer, 2002). This purpose was pursued in Experiment 1. To anticipate the main result, we indeed found such a positive bias effect. In Experiment 2 we confirmed the impact of subliminal primes on free choices by replicating the biasing effect in behavioral data and by demonstrating their impact on event-related brain potentials (ERP). A. Kiesel et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 15 (2006) 397–408 399 3. Experiment 1 Participants performed a simple choice reaction task, pressing one of two possible keys on each trial in response to one of two possible targets—the digits Ô4Õ and Ô6.Õ Unbeknownst to the participants, before each target one of these digits was presented as a subliminal prime (see Fig. 1). Apart from the ‘‘fixed’’ trials with a predetermined stimulus–response mapping, there were ‘‘free choice’’ trials. In these, a third stimulus—the digit Ô0Õ—was presented instead of the usual response signals. Participants were instructed to freely and randomly choose one of the two responses when the Ô0Õ appeared. Subliminal primes were also presented on these ‘‘free choice’’ trials. As described above, subliminal primes are assumed to trigger motor activation. If the current activation level of the response alternatives influences participantsÕ choice, then participants should prefer the primed response, as this response has been pre-activated by the subliminal prime. 3.1. Method 3.1.1. Participants Twenty volunteers (aged 17–29, mean 21.6, 14 women and 6 men) took part in an individual session of approximately 45 min. Participants took part either in fulfillment of course requirements or in exchange for pay. All reported having normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and were not familiar with the purpose of the experiment. 3.1.2. Apparatus and stimuli An IBM-compatible computer (Pentium III with 166 MHz) with a 17-in. VGA-Display was used for stim- ulus presentation and response sampling. Stimulus presentation was synchronized with the vertical retraces of a 70-Hz monitor, resulting in a vertical refresh rate of approximately 14.3 ms. Responses were executed with the index fingers of both hands and collected with an external keyboard with three response keys (1.7 cm width, distance 0.2 cm). The middle response key was not used. The numbers 4 and 6 served as primes. As targets the numbers 4 and 6 indicated that a left or right response was required, the 0 served as free-choice signal. The mask consisted of 6 randomly chosen letters (all letters, except ‘‘I,’’ were used). All characters were presented in Triplexfont in white on dark-grey background; a char- acter extended approximately 1cm in height and 0.8 cm in width. A trial started with the presentation of a random letter mask for 5 refresh cycles of the display, that is for 71 ms.
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