Uri Korisky¹, Khen Heller², David Whitney¹, Liad Mudrik²; ¹UC Berkeley, ²Tel Aviv University

Many sequential effects in perception and decision making are thought to require that the stimuli are consciously perceived. We present initial findings suggesting that processing the relations between a subliminal word (prime) and a supraliminal word (target) carries onto subsequent trials, affecting the processing of future prime-target pairs. In a reaching task, participants were asked to reach out to the screen and touch the category representing if the target word was artificial or natural. Awareness of the congruent/incongruent subliminal prime was measured at each trial, using both objective and subjective measures. Analysis of reaching trajectory showed that even in trials in which participants were not aware of the prime, reaching movements deviated towards the primed category. A sequential analysis revealed that this effect was larger when prime-target relations changed from the previous trial (e.g., a congruent trial preceded by an incongruent one or vice versa). If true, this suggests that unconscious processing allows integration over longer time windows than commonly assumed, extending across trials and over several seconds.