What Is The Subconscious Mind? imotions com

Scientific Detection of the Subconscious Mind
Up to this day, the ability to explain how the interaction of different levels of thoughts
influences our behavior remains one of the most compelling challenges in psychology
and neuroscience.
In order to untangle how one level of thought influences the other, scientists must become
able to detect different depths of the mind.
Quite often, the levels of information processing could be captured using priming
paradigms. For example, a recent psychological study showed how irrelevant cues
shape learning and suggested that the effect of conscious, subconscious, and
unconscious thoughts can be modeled varying presentation time of emotional faces.

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In this experiment, participants were presented with a set of pictures of human faces and
were asked to determine whether the facial expression in a previous picture mimicked the
same emotion. Interestingly, results showed that people were able to correctly
Interestingly, results showed that people were able to correctly recognize the difference
between facial expressions if pictures were displayed for at least 0.047s. Once the
duration of pictures was decreased to 0.027s – 0.033s, the rate of correct responses
dropped by approximately a half. In contrast, respondents became unable to discriminate
the facial expressions if the duration of the stimulus was decreased even more – to
0.020s.
This way, research demonstrated clear differentiation of conscious and unconscious
influence of thoughts: people were only able to give error-free answers if the picture could
reach the level of conscious awareness. More surprisingly, duration of pictures, shown for
as long as 0.027s – 0.033s, couldn’t be sufficient for stimulus verbalization at the level of
conscious awareness, yet had
More surprisingly, duration of pictures, shown for as long as 0.027s – 0.033s, couldn’t be
sufficient for stimulus verbalization at the level of conscious awareness, yet had a
measurable influence on behavior.
Specifically, the rate of correct responses decreased just by half, meaning that
participants were still partially able to provide with correct responses and indicated the
presence of the subconscious mind.