ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Reading and doing arithmetic nonconsciously.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 80 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
80 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- The lights are out but someone's home: sensory processing in anaesthetized human brains.Nature · 2026Article
- Increasing power for detecting awareness: a new approach to test group level objective performance.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Replicating the unconscious working memory effect: a multisite Registered Report.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Individual differences do not mask effects of unconscious processing.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Criterion placement threatens the construct validity of neural measures of consciousness.eLife · 2025Article
- Kelley's Paradox and strength skewness in research on unconscious mental processes.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Priority access to awareness? A new 'CFS tracking' paradigm reveals no priority for fearful faces or a face inversion effect.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Object relations are processed with, but not without, awareness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Unaware processing of words activates experience-derived information in conceptual-semantic brain networks.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Orthography Mediates the Unconscious Semantic Processing of Chinese Characters.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2024Article
- Awareness of everyday effects of climate change: The climate change perceptual awareness scale (CCPAS).Heliyon · 2024Article
- A new 'CFS tracking' paradigm reveals uniform suppression depth regardless of target complexity or salience.eLife · 2024Article
- Unconscious Integration of Categorical Relationship of Two Subliminal Numbers in Comparison with "5".Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Using virtual reality to induce multi-trial inattentional blindness despite trial-by-trial measures of awareness.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Implicit Processing of Numerical Order: Evidence from a Continuous Interocular Flash Suppression Study.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Article
- The Unconscious Tug-of-War: Exploring the Effect of Stimulus Selection Bias on Creative Problem Solving with Multiple Unconscious Stimuli.Psychology research and behavior management · 2023Article
- The functions of consciousness in visual processing.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Review
- Continuous manipulation of mental representations is compromised in cerebellar degeneration.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2022Article
- Minority salience and the overestimation of individuals from minority groups in perception and memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
20 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The modal view in the cognitive and neural sciences holds that consciousness is necessary for abstract, symbolic, and rule-following computations. Hence, semantic processing of multiple-word expressions, and performing of abstract mathematical computations, are widely believed to require consciousness. We report a series of experiments in which we show that multiple-word verbal expressions can be processed outside conscious awareness and that multistep, effortful arithmetic equations can be solved unconsciously. All experiments used Continuous Flash Suppression to render stimuli invisible for relatively long durations (up to 2,000 ms). Where appropriate, unawareness was verified using both objective and subjective measures. The results show that novel word combinations, in the form of expressions that contain semantic violations, become conscious before expressions that do not contain semantic violations, that the more negative a verbal expression is, the more quickly it becomes conscious, and that subliminal arithmetic equations prime their results. These findings call for a significant update of our view of conscious and unconscious processes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.