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Consciousness
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Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2008) 13591360
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog

Commentary

Conscious inuences on subliminal cognition exist

and are asymmetrical: Validation of a double prediction q
Lionel Naccache *
Hopital de la Pitie-Salpetriere, Pole des Maladies du Syste`me Nerveux, Paris, France
INSERM, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Neurospin, Saclay, France
Available online 4 March 2008

During the last 25 years, a converging set of behavioral and functional brain-imaging studies demonstrated
that in the absence of conscious perception, masked stimuli could still be represented at various levels of processing, from early vision up to semantic and even motor response stages (for a recent and comprehensive
review see Kouider & Dehaene, 2007). This rst surprise was immediately followed by a second and more
devastative discovery: These unconscious processes are not necessarily automatic, but they can be inuenced
by conscious top-down factors. For instance, unconscious priming eects are strongly modulated by temporal
(Naccache et al., 2002) and by spatial attention (Lachter et al., 2004; Marzouki et al., 2007), or by stimulus set
(Kunde et al., 2003). From a theoretical perspective, Stanislas Dehaene and I proposed in 2001, within the
global conscious workspace framework (Baars, 1989; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001), a principle of asymmetry
between top-down eects and unconscious cognition: Even tasks that require stimulus and processor selection
may be executed unconsciously once the appropriate circuit has been set up by a conscious instruction or context.
However, it should be impossible for an unconscious stimulus to modify processing on a trial-by-trial basis through
top-down control. In 2002, we explicitly proposed to raise a fundamental distinction between the sources
and eects of top-down eects (Naccache et al., 2002): We propose that the denition of automaticity
may have to be rened in order to separate the source of conscious strategic control from its eects. Processing
of masked primes is automatic inasmuch as it cannot serve as a source of information for the subsequent denition
of an explicit strategy. However, this does not imply that it is impermeable to the eects of to-down strategic control, originating from another source of information such as instructions and task context.
In the current issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Van den Bussche, Segers & Reynvoet provide a strong
experimental validation of our double-prediction. They used a masked priming paradigm, and for each trial
they presented a masked prime followed by a visible target. They manipulated the respective proportions of
stimuli presented in Arabic (e.g., 1) and verbal (e.g., ONE) notations. In full accordance with our prediction, the authors rst demonstrated that a manipulation of consciously visible targets induced a strategic
adaptation, the eects of which were observed both on consciously visible targets and on masked primes.
As predicted, a top-down phenomenon originating from conscious information (Arabic targets proportion)
was aecting the unconscious processing of masked numerical primes. Then, they showed that the very same
manipulation performed on masked primes did not induce any top-down eect: The source of a strategic
q
*

Conscious and unconscious proportion eects in masked priming.

Fax: +331 40 77 97 99.
E-mail address: lionel.naccache@psl.aphp.fr

1053-8100/$ - see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.01.002

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L. Naccache / Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2008) 13591360

change have to be consciously represented. This conrmation of the asymmetry prevailing between conscious
and unconscious cognition is in close accordance with a previous important result by Kunde, showing that the
source of the dynamic regulation of executive control (indexed by the Gratton eect) was solely driven by conscious conicting trials, while its eects applied equally on conscious and unconscious subsequent trials (Kunde, 2003). This exclusive role of conscious processing is also convergent with the important nding by Merikle
and colleagues who demonstrated in a Stroop-like paradigm that subjects could spontaneously elaborate a
new strategy only if the relevant information (proportion of wordcolor congruity) was unmasked and consciously accessible (Merikle et al., 1995).
Once this principle of asymmetry dened and validated, additional issues appear and call for future experimental inquiry. First, what is the place of metacognitive processes that may complexify the current theoretical
landscape? An unconscious representation may lead to consciously accessible eects such as motor response
conict or response time slowing. Once a subject is conscious of this indirect eect caused by an unconscious
process, he/she may use this conscious representation to regulate performance through top-down control. This
indirect way through which an unconscious process may nally induce a conscious strategic top-down eect
blind to its source still has to be demonstrated, but is theoretically possible. A second important issue stimulated by the Van den Bussche, Segers and Reynvoet study deals with the exciting project of identifying which
aspects of the generic concept of cognitive control are exclusively related to conscious cognition. Recent
works showed that an arbitrary cue consciously associated to a no-go instruction during several hundreds
of trials, may elicit a small unconscious inhibition (van Gaal et al., 2007), and that unconscious activation of
prefrontal cortex regions associated to control was possible in response to a task switching subliminal cue
(Lau & Passingham, 2007). Taken together, these results suggest a possible fractionation of cognitive control into distinct components dierentially related to conscious processing.
We do have both the relevant experimental paradigms and the functional brain-imaging tools to address
these important issues. The single limiting factor now, is our (conscious) imagination!
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