Figure 1
Example of stimulus presentation procedures in the syntactic priming task. Note. Adapted from ‘Subliminal syntactic priming’ by Berkovitch, L. and Dehaene, S. 2019, Cognitive Psychology, 109, p. 30. Stimulus presentation procedure for unmasked and masked trials, Experiment 1. Prime and target words were originally presented in French. In this example, the prime is a noun and the target is a verb (incongruent trial).
Table 1
Experimental and statistical information of the study performed by Berkovitch and Dehaene (2019).
| VISIBILITY TASK | MASKED PRIMING TASK | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EXPERIMENT | n | # TRIALS | VISIBILITY (d’) | # TRIALS | PRIMING (ms) | PEARSON r |
| 1 | 16 | 60 | 0.03 | 240 | 6* | –0.5* |
| 2 | 19 | 40 | –0.24* | 240 | 7* | N.R. |
| 3 | 16 | 60 | 0.12 | 240 | 7* | N.R. |
| 4 | 24 | 64 | 0.21* | 480 | 5* | N.R. |
| 5 | 24 | 64 | 0.07 | 480 | 17*** | N.R. |
[i] Note. The values included in this table correspond to those reported by Berkovitch and Dehaene (2019), *p < 0.05, ***p < 0.001, N.R. = Not Reported.
Figure 2
PRISMA 2020 flow diagram of the literature search strategy (Page et al., 2021).
Figure 3
Forest-plot of the d’ meta-analysis. Experiments included are coded in the left column according to the initial letters of the names of the authors, followed by the last two digits of the year of publication, and the number of the experiment within the study, or its category (Pilot, Main).
Figure 4
Forest plot representing the results of the Cohen’s dz meta-analysis. Experiments included are coded in the left column according to the initial letters of the names of the authors, followed by the last two digits of the year of publication, and the number of the experiment within the study, or its category (Pilot, Main).
Table 2
Values for the statistical parameters of each study included in the meta-analysis.
| STUDY | EXPERIMENT | n | t | d’ | STANDARD ERROR | COHEN’S dz | POWER | BF10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ARHOE-13 | ARHOE-13-1 | 6 | 2.07 | 0.100 | 0.048 | 0.845 | 0.131 | 1.335 |
| ARHOE-13-3 | 17 | 1.87 | 0.050 | 0.027 | 0.453 | 0.356 | 1.028 | |
| ARHOE-13-4 | 18 | 1.73 | 0.050 | 0.029 | 0.408 | 0.376 | 0.841 | |
| IS-14 | IS-14-Pilot | 10 | 0.24 | 0.020 | 0.083 | 0.076 | 0.214 | 0.316 |
| IS-14-Main | 15 | 1.60 | 0.200 | 0.125 | 0.413 | 0.316 | 0.745 | |
| BD-19 | BD-19-1 | 16 | 0.40 | 0.030 | 0.075 | 0.100 | 0.337 | 0.274 |
| BD-19-2 | 19 | – 2.60 | – 0.240 | 0.092 | – 0.596 | 0.395 | 3.190 | |
| BD-19-3 | 16 | 1.83 | 0.120 | 0.065 | 0.457 | 0.337 | 0.985 | |
| BD-19-4 | 24 | 2.38 | 0.215 | 0.090 | 0.486 | 0.487 | 2.197 | |
| BD-19-5 | 24 | 0.94 | 0.070 | 0.074 | 0.192 | 0.487 | 0.319 | |
| PMZ-23 | PMZ-23-Pilot-1 | 19 | 1.80 | 0.160 | 0.089 | 0.413 | 0.395 | 0.912 |
| PMZ-23-Pilot-2 | 19 | 2.98 | 0.340 | 0.114 | 0.684 | 0.395 | 6.248 | |
| PMZ-23-Pilot-3 | 19 | 3.28 | 0.300 | 0.091 | 0.752 | 0.395 | 10.868 | |
| PMZ-23-1 | 36 | 3.52 | 0.160 | 0.045 | 0.587 | 0.668 | 26.416 | |
| PMZ-23-2 | 39 | 3.85 | 0.170 | 0.044 | 0.616 | 0.705 | 64.115 | |
| PMZ-23-3 | 31 | 3.92 | 0.160 | 0.041 | 0.704 | 0.600 | 63.534 |
[i] Note. Experiments included are coded in the second left column according to the initial letters of the names of the authors (same as the Studies, in the leftmost column), followed by the last two digits of the year of publication, and the number of the experiment within the study, or its category (Pilot, Main). Pyatigorskaya, Maran, and Zaccarella (2023) reported t-values against 0.12 in their three main experiments. Therefore, we calculated the t-values against zero by dividing the d’ by the standard error.
Figure 5
Violin plots representing the distribution of permuted reliability scores computed as split-half correlations (rxx) for priming and visibility tasks across the five experiments conducted by Berkovitch and Dehaene (2019). Diamonds indicate the mean rxx for each experiment. Crosses represent the corresponding mean Spearman-Brown correction (r*xx) with negative values treated as zero.
Figure 6
Representation of the correlation between the performance in the masked priming task and the visibility task across the five experiments. Each dot represents an individual participant, with different colors referring to each of the five experiments. The colored lines represent the trend of the correlation for each experimental sample. The black line depicts the trend for the five experiments combined.
Figure 7
Sensitivity across tasks in Berkovitch and Dehaene’s (2019) dataset. The upper panel (A.) corresponds to the masked priming task. d’ priming is plotted across the five experiments. The dotted red line represents the mean d’ priming = 0.113. The lower panel (B.) refers to the visibility task for which d’ is plotted. The dotted red line represents the mean d’ = 0.045.