ABSTRACT
In the last decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the acceptability of theoretical interpretations of research findings in terms of unconscious cognition. Part of the shift is in language—many psychologists have become willing to use the word unconscious in sentences that, previously, would have been acceptable only by using alternate terms such as “unattended,” “automatic,” “procedural,” or “implicit.” However, to characterize this recent change as being just a matter of linguistic style would be to underestimate it severely. There has also been a conceptual and empirical revolution. An important factor in this revolution has been the demonstration of replicability for a class of findings that, until very recently, were widely regarded with great skepticism—findings of subliminal semantic activation (see Balota, 1983; Bornstein, 1992; Dagenbach, Carr, & Wilhelmsen, 1989; Fowler, Wolford, Slade, & Tassinary, 1981; Greenwald, Klinger, & Liu, 1989; Groeger, 1988; Hardaway, 1990; Marcel, 1983). Subliminal semantic activation (SSA) can be defined as “indirect evidence for analysis of semantic content of target word stimuli under conditions that limit or prevent awareness of the presence of these words” (Greenwald, 1992, p. 768). 1
