‘‘Change of Mind’’ within and between nonconscious (masked) and conscious (unmasked) visual processing

We examined the updating of decisions made during visuo-motor processing when two sequentially presented stimuli, Prime1 and Prime2, primed discriminative responses to a following probe. In Experiment 1, the visibility of the two primes was suppressed or left intact by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of the stimuli immediately following them. In Experiment 2, the visibility of Prime2 was suppressed or left intact by varying its spatial separation from the following probe. We found (1) that Prime2 dominated the effects of Prime1; (2) that Prime2’s updating was stronger when the Prime2–probe SOA was 200 as compared to 53 ms; and (3) that Prime2’s updating was weaker when the Prime2–probe spatial separation was 58 as compared to 0 minarc. We conclude that these effects are due to an interaction of spatial attention and the state (conscious vs. nonconscious) of processing of Prime2.