Whether masked primes could activate cognitive processes in semantic level without gaining access to consciousness and whether there were form dominance and global dominance in visual unconscious processing were studied mainly by subliminal priming technique. The main results are as follows:
1 When the primes and the targets belonged to the same or two different stimulus serials, the unseen numerical prime could facilitate or inhibit the subsequent processing of the target, demonstrating the existence of unconscious processing in semantic level.
2 The global color cue of the prime had no effect on the global shape discrimination to the target while the global shape cue could facilitate or inhibit the subsequent processing of the global color of the target, indicating that form dominance in visual unconscious processing did exist.
3 The unseen global shape could facilitate or inhibit the subsequent processing of the global color of the target, but had no effect on the local color discrimination, indicating that form dominance was tuned by selective attention.
4 The global shape of the prime could affect the responses to the local line orientation of the target, but could not do to the local color, suggesting that global shape dominance was related to the form and color pathways of visual processing.
5 When participants discriminated the target line orientation, they responded more slowly in congruent trials (the global shapes of the prime and the target were same) than in incongruent trials (the global shapes were different), indicating that a bias inhibition to the global shape of the prime might be involved in a local shape discrimination task to the target.
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