Subliminal message text- What duration to input into E-Prime

PST User Forum

Home

Members

Calendar

Who's On

Welcome Guest ( Login | Register )

Subliminal message text- What duration to...

Rate Topic

Display Mode

Topic Options

Author

Message

silaslang

Posted 3/9/2008 6:35:15 PM

Forum Newbie

Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 3/11/2008 5:07:07 PM
Posts: 1, Visits: 4

I am a second year psychology student devising an experiment with E-Prime. I have decided to test the controversial theory of subliminal messages. I intend to get the participants to answer simply maths equations with the answer being flashed subliminally before the sum is presented. This will then be compared against a control group.

Can anyone give advice on the length of time to input into E-Prime. All the durations Im trying are clearly visible to the eye, I want the duration of either 16ms or 25 ms. What digits should I input as the duration? And could it be my laptops refresh rate that is clearly showing the numbers?

Any help will be appreciated.

Post #1329

Evelina

Posted 4/4/2008 9:45:27 AM

Forum Newbie

Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 5/28/2008 4:18:20 PM
Posts: 9, Visits: 14

if you just present a text and flash it for just one frame, it will be clearly visible to the observers (even if its one frame). what you might want to do is use a visual mask. so present a text for one frame and then right after a texture mask and then your experimental math problem. so say you flash 5, mask and 2+3. so if the observer is faster at solving the problem correctly more than half the time when the first number matches the actual item, then you get subliminal processing.

actually i think there are some problems with the method in that one can argue that it takes long time not only to compute the answer but to type it in etc which could really affect your results or give you a lot of noise. you might want to stick with 2-4 possible answers for observers to choose from to solve the problem...

similar work is done by Naccache and Dehaene and you might want to look into masked priming or unconscious priming when you do lit search.

Post #1438

« Prev Topic | Next Topic »

Permissions

All times are GMT -5:00, Time now is 9:44am