I received my Ph.D. from Department of Psychology at the University of Washington in 1997. Currently (among other things) I run a company called Millisecond Software, which produces Inquisit, a popular experiment generator for creating and running reaction time experiments on Windows PCs. The following are manuscripts I published with Tony Greenwald on Unconscious Cognition. See Tony's web site for additional research on subliminal perception.

Send questions to Sean Draine or Tony Greenwald.

• Replicable Unconcious Semantic Priming
  • Authors: Sean C. Draine and Anthony G. Greenwald
  • Publication Info: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (1998).
  • Formats: [HTML] [Word 6.0]
  • Abstract: In four experiments, subjects classified visually presented target words as pleasant/unpleasant words or male/female first names. Prime words were similar (congruent) or dissimilar (incongruent) in meaning to targets. Brief duration of prime words (17, 33, or 50 ms), along with pre- and post-masking, prevented most subjects from perceiving their physical and semantic properties. By constraining response latencies to fall within a response window P a narrow time band that occurred earlier than subjects would ordinarily respond P these experiments consistently produced subliminal priming effects, indicated by greater error rates for incongruent than congruent priming trials. This conclusion was confirmed by analyzing magnitude of priming as a regression function of prime perceptibility using the method of Greenwald, Klinger, and Schuh (1995). The data of each experiment passed their significant-intercept criterion for demonstrating unconscious cognition.

• Analytic Limitations of Unconscious Language Processing
  • Author: Sean C. Draine
  • Publication Info: Doctoral Dissertation (1997).
  • Formats: [Word 6.0]
  • Abstract: Cognitive theorists have assumed that unconscious cognition, due to inherent analytic limitations, plays a minor role in language comprehension relative to conscious systems. The following research tested this assumption by examining whether the analytic powers of unconscious cognition include the ability to process the meanings morphologically complex words and simple grammatical constructions. Four experiments used variations of a two-choice, subliminal priming paradigm (Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996) to assess unconscious processing of (1) grammatically uncombinable word pairs, (2) two-word grammatical negations, (3) one-word lexical negations, (4) compound words, (5) and noun phrases. Experiments 1 demonstrated unconscious semantic processing of multiple, uncombinable words. Experiment 2 demonstrated unconscious sensitivity to the meanings of the constituents of two-word phrases, but not to phrase-level meanings. Results of Experiment 3 showed weak evidence for unconscious processing of lexical negation. In Experiment 4, priming effects were obtained for supraliminal noun phrases and compound words, but subliminal conditions showed no evidence for unconscious processing of the primes. The findings indicate that unconscious linguistic analyses are limited to activation of stored lexical representations of morphologically simple words. Semantic representations of unstored linguistic constructions such as phrases and morphologically complex words, in contrast, are constructed on line by conscious cognitive systems.

• Three Cognitive Markers of Unconscious Semantic Activation
  • Authors: Anthony G. Greenwald and Sean C. Draine
  • Publication Info: Science, 273, 1699-1702 (1996)
  • Formats: [HTML]
  • Abstract. A "response window" technique is described and used to reliably demonstrate unconscious activation of meaning by subliminal (visually masked) words. Visually masked prime words were shown to influence judged meaning of following target words. This priming-effect marker was used to identify two additional markers of unconscious semantic activation: (i) the activation is very short-lived (the target word must occur within about 100 milliseconds of the subliminal prime); and (ii) unlike supraliminal prime-target pairs, a subliminal pair leaves no memory trace that can be observed in response to the next prime-target pair. Thus, unconscious semantic activation is shown to be a readily reproducible phenomenon but also very limited in the duration of its effect.

• Modeling Unconscious Gender Bias in Fame Judgments: Finding the Proper Branch of the Correct (Multinomial) Tree
  • Authors: Sean C. Draine, Anthony G. Greenwald, and Mahzarin R. Banaji
  • Publication Info: Consciousness and Cognition, 5, 221-225 (1996)
  • Formats: [HTML]--[Word 6.0]--[WordPerfect 6.0]
  • Abstract. In the preceding article, Buchner and Wippich used a guessing-corrected, multinomial process-dissociation analysis to test whether a gender bias in fame judgments reported by Banaji and Greenwald (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1995, 68, 181-198) was unconscious. Buchner and Wippich concluded that the gender-bias effect was not unconscious on the basis of finding no difference in model-estimated familiarity between previously presented nonfamous male and female names. This conclusion is questioned by noting that (a) the gender difference in familiarity that Buchner and Wippich modeled was different from the critical gender difference in criterion for fame judgments reported by Banaji and Greenwald, (b) the assumptions of Buchner and Wippich=s multinomial model exclude processes that are plausibly involved in the fame judgment task, and (c) constructs of Buchner and Wippich=s that correspond most closely to Banaji and Greenwald=s gender-bias interpretation are formulated so as to preclude modeling that interpretation.

• Unconscious Processing of Two-Word Negations: A 'Not Bad' Experiment
  • Authors: Sean C. Draine and Anthony G. Greenwald
  • Publication Info: Poster presented at the meetings of APS, San Francisco, CA (June, 1996)
  • Formats: [Word 6.0]
  • Abstract. Subjects classified simple evaluatively polarized target words as pleasant or unpleasant in meaning. Target words were preceded by primes involving either the negation of an evaluatively polarized root word, or just the root word itself. Negated primes consisted of root words preceded by "NOT" (e.g. "NOT CLEAN", "NOT DIRTY") in Experiment 1, and root words preceded by prefixes such as "UN" and "DIS" (e.g. "UNHURT", "DISLOYAL") in Experiment 2. Prime stimuli were presented both subliminally (forward and backward masked) and supraliminally (no masking). In both Experiments 1 and 2, evaluative priming effects were obtained with supraliminal and subliminal primes. The direction of these priming effects, however, was determined entirely by the root words, and was uninfluenced by the presence of negation. This result suggests that the operation of negation, whether morphological or grammatical in form, exceeds the analytic capabilities of unconscious cognition.

• Do Subliminal Stimuli Enter the Mind Unnoticed? Tests with a New Method
  • Authors: Anthony G. Greenwald and Sean C. Draine
  • Publication Info: in J. Cohen & J. Schooler (Eds.) Scientific Approaches to Consciousness: 25th Carnegie Symposium on Cogntion. Hillsdale, NJ (1996)
  • Formats: [Word 6.0]
  • Abstract. Existing methods to test for subliminal activation by undetectable stimuli have been criticized as intrisically inconclusive. A new method, analyzing the regression relation between direct and indirect measures of responses to near-threshold stimuli, overcomes these criticisms. Obtained results indicated that subliminal stimuli, even when unnoticed, influenced consciously guided performances. Several potential criticisms of the new method are considered, but are found not to undermine this conclusion.

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