your unconscious knows your name你的潜意识知道你的名字.pdfVIP

Your Unconscious Knows Your Name Roland Pfister*, Carsten Pohl, Andrea Kiesel, Wilfried Kunde ¨ ¨ Department of Psychology, Julius-Maximilians-University of Wurzburg, Wurzburg, Germany Abstract One’s own name constitutes a unique part of conscious awareness – but does this also hold true for unconscious processing? The present study shows that the own name has the power to bias a person’s actions unconsciously even in conditions that render any other name ineffective. Participants judged whether a letter string on the screen was a name or a non-word while this target stimulus was preceded by a masked prime stimulus. Crucially, the participant’s own name was among these prime stimuli and facilitated reactions to following name targets whereas the name of another, yoked participant did not. Signal detection results confirmed that participants were not aware of any of the prime stimuli, including their own name. These results extend traditional findings on ‘‘breakthrough’’ phenomena of personally relevant stimuli to the domain of unconscious processing. Thus, the brain seems to possess adroit mechanisms to identify and process such stimuli even in the absence of conscious awareness. Citation: Pfister R, Pohl C, Kiesel A, Kunde W (2012) Your Unconscious Knows Your Name. PLoS ONE 7(3): e32402. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032402 Editor: Manos Tsakiris, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom Received December 1, 2011; Accepted January 30, 2012; Published March 5, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Pfister et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the origi