TRANSITIONS BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS EDITED BY : Marcus Rothkirch, Morten Overgaard and Guido Hesselmann PUBLISHED IN : Frontiers in Psychology 1 February 2018| Transitions between C onsciousness and Unconsciousness Frontiers in Psychology Frontiers Copyright Statement © Copyright 2007-2018 Frontiers Media SA. All rights reserved. All content included on this site, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, video/audio clips, downloads, data compilations and software, is the property of or is licensed to Frontiers Media SA (“Frontiers”) or its licensees and/or subcontractors. The copyright in the text of individual articles is the property of their respective authors, subject to a license granted to Frontiers. The compilation of articles constituting this e-book, wherever published, as well as the compilation of all other content on this site, is the exclusive property of Frontiers. 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Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: researchtopics@frontiersin.org 2 February 2018| Transitions between C onsciousness and Unconsciousness Frontiers in Psychology TRANSITIONS BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS Image: Yvonne Daschowski. Topic Editors: Marcus Rothkirch , Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany Morten Overgaard , Aarhus University, Denmark Guido Hesselmann , Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany Over the last years, a large body of experimental data have been generated in the attempt to understand consciousness and its neural underpinnings. In this respect, particular interest has been paid to the attempt to distinguish between conscious experience and unconscious states which however may still be considered as mental states (e.g., in virtue of their representational 3 February 2018| Transitions between C onsciousness and Unconsciousness Frontiers in Psychology nature). This is of course not without reason. A deep understanding of that which specifically characterizes conscious states, including neural correlates and cognitive functions, may crucially inform the ambition of understanding the relation between experience and the physical world. Nevertheless, the question has historically been challenged by the fact that consciousness is available in the first person only – not to other people, including scientists. Different methodo- logical traditions and choices have led to quite different understandings of how conscious and unconscious states relate, and diverse empirical work has been inspired and guided by various cognitive and neurobiological theories of consciousness. The very diverse viewpoints include such different positions as the idea that unconscious states are associated with the very same functional characteristics as conscious states, and the idea that no informational state that is available for action can be completely unconscious. The Research Topic “Transitions between consciousness and unconsciousness” is therefore devoted to this particular question, how to understand the relation and transition between consciousness and unconsciousness. We hope that the reader will find the collected articles both informative and thought-provoking, and that this Research Topic will stimulate the scientific debate. Citation: Rothkirch, M., Overgaard, M., Hesselmann, G., eds. (2018). Transitions Between Con- sciousness and Unconsciousness. Lausanne: Frontiers Media. doi: 10.3389/978-2-88945-431-0 4 February 2018| Transitions between C onsciousness and Unconsciousness Frontiers in Psychology Table of Contents 06 Editorial: Transitions between Consciousness and Unconsciousness Marcus Rothkirch, Morten Overgaard and Guido Hesselmann Chapter 1: To What Extent Can Subliminally Presented Stimuli Be Processed and Influence Behavior? 09 A Double Dissociation between Conscious and Non-conscious Priming of Responses and Affect: Evidence for a Contribution of Misattributions to the Priming of Affect Florian Goller, Shah Khalid and Ulrich Ansorge 21 Subliminal Face Emotion Processing: A Comparison of Fearful and Disgusted Faces Shah Khalid and Ulrich Ansorge 39 Subliminally and Supraliminally Acquired Long-Term Memories Jointly Bias Delayed Decisions Simon Ruch, Elizabeth Herbert and Katharina Henke 55 Influence of Suboptimally and Optimally Presented Affective Pictures and Words on Consumption-Related Behavior Piotr Winkielman and Yekaterina Gogolushko Chapter 2: Which Stimulus Attributes Influence the Access to Awareness? 70 Interplay between Narrative and Bodily Self in Access to Consciousness: No Difference between Self- and Non-self Attributes Jean-Paul Noel, Olaf Blanke, Andrea Serino and Roy Salomon 80 Between-Subject Variability in the Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression Paradigm: Potential Causes, Consequences, and Solutions Surya Gayet and Timo Stein 91 Neural Correlates of Subjective Awareness for Natural Scene Categorization of Color Photographs and Line-Drawings Qiufang Fu, Yong-Jin Liu, Zoltan Dienes, Jianhui Wu, Wenfeng Chen and Xiaolan Fu 104 Relative Spatial Frequency Processing Drives Hemispheric Asymmetry in Conscious Awareness Elise A. Piazza and Michael A. Silver Chapter 3: How Does Consciousness Emerge? 111 The Emergence of Visual Awareness: Temporal Dynamics in Relation to Task and Mask Type Markus Kiefer and Thomas Kammer 5 February 2018| Transitions between C onsciousness and Unconsciousness Frontiers in Psychology 125 In and Out of Consciousness: How Does Conscious Processing (D)evolve Over Time? Jaan Aru and Talis Bachmann 129 A Sensorimotor Signature of the Transition to Conscious Social Perception: Co-regulation of Active and Passive Touch Hiroki Kojima, Tom Froese, Mizuki Oka, Hiroyuki Iizuka and Takashi Ikegami 143 Oscillatory Correlates of Visual Consciousness Stefano Gallotto, Alexander T. Sack, Teresa Schuhmann and Tom A. de Graaf Chapter 4: To What Extent Can Rules and Regularities Be Learned Unconsciously? 159 Impact of Response Stimulus Interval on Transfer of Non-local Dependent Rules in Implicit Learning: An ERP Investigation Jianping Huang, Hui Dai, Jing Ye, Chuanlin Zhu, Yingli Li and Dianzhi Liu 169 The Emergence of Explicit Knowledge in a Serial Reaction Time Task: The Role of Experienced Fluency and Strength of Representation Sarah Esser and Hilde Haider Chapter 5: How Can the Conscious Representation of Visual Input Be Dissociated from its Consequences? 187 Subliminal Impending Collision Increases Perceived Object Size and Enhances Pupillary Light Reflex Lihong Chen, Xiangyong Yuan, Qian Xu, Ying Wang and Yi Jiang Chapter 6: Which High-Level Functions Can Proceed Unconsciously? 195 Commentary: Definitely maybe: can unconscious processes perform the same functions as conscious processes? Ariel Goldstein and Ran R. Hassin 199 Not Merely Experiential: Unconscious Thought Can Be Rational Katie E. Garrison and Ian M. Handley Chapter 7: Strategies for Future Research 212 What We Talk about When We Talk about Unconscious Processing – A Plea for Best Practices Marcus Rothkirch and Guido Hesselmann EDITORIAL published: 24 January 2018 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00020 Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org January 2018 | Volume 9 | Article 20 | Edited and reviewed by: Samuel Evans, University of Westminster, United Kingdom *Correspondence: Guido Hesselmann guido.hesselmann@charite.de Specialty section: This article was submitted to Consciousness Research, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Received: 30 December 2017 Accepted: 09 January 2018 Published: 24 January 2018 Citation: Rothkirch M, Overgaard M and Hesselmann G (2018) Editorial: Transitions between Consciousness and Unconsciousness. Front. Psychol. 9:20. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00020 Editorial: Transitions between Consciousness and Unconsciousness Marcus Rothkirch 1 , Morten Overgaard 2 and Guido Hesselmann 1 * 1 Visual Perception Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin, Germany, 2 Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Keywords: consciousness, neural correlates of consciousness, unconscious processing, awareness, diversity Editorial on the Research Topic Transitions between Consciousness and Unconsciousness Over the last years, a large body of experimental data have been generated in the attempt to understand consciousness and its neural underpinnings. In this respect, particular interest has been paid to the attempt to distinguish between conscious experience and unconscious states which however may still be considered as mental states (e.g., in virtue of their representational nature). This is of course not without reason. A deep understanding of that which specifically characterizes conscious states, including neural correlates and cognitive functions, may crucially inform the ambition of understanding the relation between experience and the physical world. Nevertheless, the question has historically been challenged by the fact that consciousness is available in the first person only—not to other people, including scientists. Different methodological traditions and choices have led to quite different understandings of how conscious and unconscious states relate (e.g., Rothkirch and Hesselmann, this research topic), and diverse empirical work has been inspired and guided by various cognitive and neurobiological theories of consciousness. The very diverse viewpoints include such different positions as the idea that unconscious states are associated with the very same functional characteristics as conscious states (e.g., Hassin, 2013), and the idea that no informational state that is available for action can be completely unconscious (Overgaard and Mogensen, 2014, 2015). The Research Topic “Transitions between consciousness and unconsciousness” is therefore devoted to this particular question, how to understand the relation and transition between consciousness and unconsciousness. It comprises 18 articles from different backgrounds, including original studies, as well as reviews and commentaries, which speaks to the multifaceted research in this field. In the following, we will provide a brief summary for each contribution. One of the most appealing questions in the field of consciousness research is whether stimuli that cannot be consciously perceived by the observer can nevertheless influence the observer’s behavior, and if, to what extent they do so. Four submissions to the research topic approached this fascinating question while focusing on different processes and behavioral outcomes. One fruitful approach to study the aforementioned unconscious influences is masked priming. Priming refers to the observation that the response to a target stimulus can be influenced by the presentation of an irrelevant prime stimulus prior to the target. In masked priming, in particular, the prime stimulus is not consciously perceived. On the basis of this paradigm, Goller et al. investigated affective priming, indicating that an incongruence between prime and target entails a negative evaluation of a neutral symbol following the target. The authors observed that such affective priming effects were stronger for unconscious than for conscious primes, which they interpreted as a misattribution of the prime-target 6 Rothkirch et al. Editorial: Transitions between Consciousness and Unconsciousness incongruence to the unrelated neutral symbol. In a similar vein, Khalid and Ansorge used masked priming to study the subliminal processing of faces displaying disgust. Using low- and high-pass filtered faces as prime stimuli, the authors intended to identify a potential subcortical origin of the priming effect. Surprisingly, however, they found a reversed priming effect, such that a prime-target congruence led to slower reaction times. This effect was further restricted to conditions in which attention was diverted away from the prime. This points toward a unique unconscious effect of disgusting faces, which does not seem to rely on subcortical pathways. While also studying the effect of subliminal facial expressions, Winkielman and Gogolushko focused on another, “higher-level” behavioral outcome, namely the consumption of a beverage. When primed with a positive facial expression participants tended to consume more than after being primed with a negative expression. This effect was observed for supra- and subliminal primes and restricted to pictorial primes (in comparison to words). Finally, Ruch et al. could show that subliminally presented information can also impact decision-making. In a first phase, faces were presented subliminally along with written high- or low-wage occupations. These faces were presented again in a second phase, this time supraliminally and either with congruous or incongruous occupations in comparison to the first presentation. A later recall phase showed that both the previous sub- and supraliminally presented information biased participants’ decision on the incomes of the depicted person. A further relevant question in the realm of consciousness research is how stimuli get access to awareness and, in particular, how specific stimulus attributes facilitate this process. Based on previous findings indicating a hemisphere-specific processing of spatial frequencies, Piazza and Silver set out to test whether the awareness of spatial frequency information also differs between the two hemispheres. Using binocular rivalry to approach this question, the authors demonstrate that the visual system’s classification of high and low spatial frequencies, and therefore the hemisphere preferentially processing the given frequency, is dependent on other, concurrently presented spatial frequencies. This indicates that a relative rather than an absolute processing of spatial frequencies contributes to hemispheric differences in perceptual selection. Another popular technique to study the access to awareness is breaking continuous flash suppression. Noel et al. applied this technique to investigate the preferential processing of self-relevant stimuli. While they did not observe such a preference for self- vs. non-self-related words, they found that participants’ response criterion for the categorization of these words (i.e., self vs. non-self) was dependent on an acoustic signal administered either within or outside the peripersonal space. However, a common observation in studies using breaking continuous flash suppression is the high variability between participants. What is more, as Gayet and Stein demonstrate, the magnitude of reaction time differences between conditions is highly correlated with each individual’s overall suppression times. As a remedy, the authors advocate the usage of a simple latency normalization method, which also yields reaction time distributions that are better suited for parametric testing. Besides focusing on specific stimulus attributes that facilitate awareness, one can also ask in a broader sense how consciousness develops over time. Is the transition between unconscious and conscious states a gradual or dichotomous phenomenon? This is one of the long-standing questions that has steered heated debates in consciousness research. Using backward masking with word targets, Kiefer and Kammer varied the context by the modulation of the task and the mask type. From their results, the authors concluded that the emergence of awareness is neither purely gradual nor dichotomous but rather depends on the specific parameters of the task and the type of mask. In the context of social interactions, Kojima et al. were specifically interested in how people become aware of the presence of others. Measures of turn-taking and movement synchrony that were assessed during a social interaction paradigm indicated that the awareness of the other’s presence was reciprocally co- regulated by both agents. At the neural level, the identification of brain processes that are related to or even causally determine conscious experiences has received attention under the term “the neural correlates of consciousness.” Measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) during a backward masking paradigm, Fu et al. addressed the question whether visual awareness is related to a visual awareness negativity (VAN). The authors found that ERP components were related to visual awareness for color photographs but not for line drawings. Furthermore, the VAN varied with visual awareness in a linear fashion while positive late potentials changed in a non-linear way, indicating that different ERP components are related to different types of visual awareness. In their review paper, Gallotto et al. provide a basic overview of neural oscillations and ways to measure them. They also emphasize that the distinction between the neural prerequisites, substrates, and consequences of conscious experience remains a major challenge for future research. Also with respect to the general time course of consciousness, many aspects have been left unclear to date, as pointed out by Aru and Bachmann. These open questions are particularly related to the form of the functions that describe how preconscious content accesses consciousness but also how a conscious representation can decay again. The authors particularly point toward the importance of the context, which is in line with the aforementioned findings by Kiefer and Kammer. We received two studies addressing the question to what extent rules and regularities can be learned unconsciously. Huang et al. used ERPs to explore the impact of the response- stimulus-interval (RSI) on the transfer of knowledge of abstract implicit rules. Only at the longer of two RSIs, participants were able to acquire abstract implicit knowledge. Furthermore, the results suggest that amplitude variations of the N200 and P300 components of the ERP may be useful for detecting transfer- related effects. Esser and Haider investigated how unconscious knowledge becomes conscious knowledge in the serial reaction time task (SRTT). Regular (i.e., in line with the rule) and deviant trials (i.e., violating the rule) were either presented in mini-blocks or randomly mixed. While the degree of implicit knowledge, as assessed on the basis of a wagering task, was not affected by the presentation order, the subjectively experienced fluency was higher for the presentation in mini-blocks. More Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org January 2018 | Volume 9 | Article 20 | 7 Rothkirch et al. Editorial: Transitions between Consciousness and Unconsciousness explicit knowledge was gathered for longer mini-blocks. The authors interpret their findings in light of the unexpected event hypothesis, according to which explicit knowledge arises from the observation of one’s own changes in behavior that, in turn, are based on implicit learning. In their pupillometry study, Chen at al. asked how the conscious representation of visual input can be dissociated from its consequences. They presented looming spheres on the screen such that they would either collide with the observer or miss the observer’s head by a small margin. Participants had the task to either judge the size of the stimulus or to decide whether the stimulus would have collided with them. In all experiments (with the exception of the first one), participants could not distinguish between collisions and near- misses. The results showed that participants judged the size of the colliding stimuli as being bigger than the near-miss stimuli, and pupil constrictions turned out to be greater for the colliding stimuli. The authors conclude that threatening stimuli may influence visual perception without necessarily evoking a conscious representation of the threat. In addition, one general commentary and one original research article were concerned with the scope of unconscious high-level cognitive functions. In their commentary, Goldstein and Hassin follow up on the debate about the “Yes It Can” (YIC) principle (Hassin, 2013; Hesselmann and Moors, 2015). According to YIC, unconscious processes can carry out every fundamental high-level function that conscious processes can perform. As the authors point out, one of the implications of YIC is that the search for a “holy grail” —i.e., the function that only consciousness can do—is the wrong way to go. Instead, understanding what it means to be human would be better achieved by understanding how unconscious processes pursue functions that only they can pursue. In their study, Garrison and Handley tested the hypothesis that “unconscious thought” (Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 2006) is distinct from intuitive processes, and thus might be rational. The authors manipulated participants’ reliance on the experiential versus rational system (Epstein, 1994) and found that a period of distraction facilitated outcomes independently from these two processing modes. They also manipulated unconscious thought (during a distraction phase) toward solving a logical reasoning problem, and observed that unconscious thought was superior at this analytical task, suggesting that unconscious thought may be rational. As the authors point out, however, the concept of “unconscious thought” itself remains controversial (Nieuwenstein et al., 2015). The main goal of this Research Topic “Transitions between consciousness and unconsciousness” was to provide a snapshot of the current state of affairs in this research area. The final collection of 18 articles does exactly that and provides an overview of current trends and opinions, as well as perspectives on theoretical and methodological questions. As pointed out by two of us in a perspective article, research on conscious and unconscious processes is characterized by a large diversity of methods, measures, statistical analyses, and concepts. The same holds true for this collection. We hope that the reader will find the collected articles both informative and thought-provoking, and that this Research Topic will stimulate the scientific debate. AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication. FUNDING MR and GH were supported by the German Research Foundation (grants: RO 4836/2-1 and HE 6244/1-2). REFERENCES Dijksterhuis, A., and Nordgren, L. F. (2006). A theory of unconscious thought. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 1, 95–109. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.0 0007.x Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious. Am. Psychol. 49, 709–724. Hassin, R. R. (2013). Yes it can: on the functional abilities of the human unconscious. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 8, 195–207. doi: 10.1177/1745691612460684 Hesselmann, G., and Moors, P. (2015). Definitely maybe: can unconscious processes perform the same functions as conscious processes? Front. Psychol. 6:584. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00584 Nieuwenstein, M. R., Wierenga, T., Morey, R. D., Wicherts, J. M., Blom, T. N., Wagenmakers, E.-J., et al. (2015). On making the right choice: A meta-analysis and large-scale replication attempt of the unconscious thought advantage. Judgm. Decis. Mak. 10, 1–17. Overgaard, M., and Mogensen, J. (2014). Conscious perception: A representational, non-reductionistic, level-dependent approach. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. Ser B Biol. Sci. 369:20130209. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0209 Overgaard, M., and Mogensen, J. (2015). Reconciling current approaches to blindsight. Conscious. Cogn. 32, 33–40. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2014.08.003 Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Copyright © 2018 Rothkirch, Overgaard and Hesselmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org January 2018 | Volume 9 | Article 20 | 8 ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 27 March 2017 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00453 Edited by: Guido Hesselmann, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany Reviewed by: Roy Salomon, Bar-Ilan University, Israel Marine Vernet, National Institute of Mental Health (NIH), USA *Correspondence: Florian Goller florian.goller@univie.ac.at Specialty section: This article was submitted to Consciousness Research, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Received: 31 October 2016 Accepted: 10 March 2017 Published: 27 March 2017 Citation: Goller F, Khalid S and Ansorge U (2017) A Double Dissociation between Conscious and Non-conscious Priming of Responses and Affect: Evidence for a Contribution of Misattributions to the Priming of Affect. Front. Psychol. 8:453. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00453 A Double Dissociation between Conscious and Non-conscious Priming of Responses and Affect: Evidence for a Contribution of Misattributions to the Priming of Affect Florian Goller 1 * , Shah Khalid 2 and Ulrich Ansorge 1 1 Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, 2 Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany Studies have demonstrated conscious and non-conscious priming of responses and of affect. Concerning response priming, presenting a target-related (congruent) distractor prior to a target typically facilitates target responses. This facilitation – the response- priming effect – is observed in comparison to a less related (incongruent) distractor. An incongruent distractor would interfere with the required response to the target. This response-priming effect is found with both conscious distractors, of which participants are aware, and non-conscious distractors, of which participants are not aware. In partly related research, distractors have also yielded affective priming effects on the evaluations of task-unrelated neutral symbols that followed the target: In comparison to the congruent condition, participants evaluated a neutral symbol presented after an incongruent distractor-target sequence as more negative. This affective priming effect was sometimes ascribed to the participants’ misattributions of distractor-target conflict to the unrelated neutral symbols. Here, we set out to test this possibility. If the misattribution explanation of affective priming holds true, affective priming would be stronger with non-conscious than with conscious distractors: Mostly the non-conscious distractors would mask distractor-target conflict as the true affect-origin and, therefore, invite participants’ misattribution of the primed affect to the neutral symbol in temporal vicinity. In contrast, only with conscious distractors, participants would be aware of distractor-target conflict as the true affect-origin and should, therefore, be better able to attribute their affective responses to the distractor-target relationship itself. In three experiments, we confirmed this prediction of a stronger affective priming effect in non-conscious than conscious distractor conditions, while at the same time showing conscious response-priming effects to even exceed non-conscious response-priming effects. Together, these results amount to a double dissociation between affective priming, being stronger with unconscious distractors, and response priming, being stronger with conscious distractors. This double dissociation supports the misattribution Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org March 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 453 | Goller et al. Non-conscious Processing and Affect Misattributions explanation and makes clear that the amount of distractor-elicited response conflict alone does not account for the amount of affective priming. Moreover, the participants’ unawareness of the distractors is critical for the amount of affective priming of neutral symbols in temporal vicinity. Keywords: flanker task, masking, non-conscious processing, misattributions of affect, conflict INTRODUCTION Have you ever snapped at a friend for no apparent reason? Have you ever felt sad without knowing why? These examples illustrate that humans can experience negative (or positive) affective responses without an awareness of the objects that elicited the affective responses. In the present article, affective responses are defined as the actual positive or negative impressions that are elicited by an object, and the true affect-origin is defined as the object that triggered these impressions. As our examples imply, humans are sometimes uncertain about the true origins of their affective responses, an observation in line with emotion theories. For example, Arnold (1960) explained that emotions can be triggered without an awareness of their true origins. In general, Arnold believed that emotions are based on appraisals of objects or events as positive or negative. These appraisals correspond to what we called positive and negative affective responses. In the case of an automatic emotion generation, Arnold argued that the appraisal process is hidden from introspection, meaning that participants do not have to become aware of the true affect- origins. In more recent emotion theories, this claim was repeated. A number of researchers claimed that feelings that are initially elicited are only subsequently attributed to an object as its origin (Schachter and Singer, 1962; Weiner, 1986). For instance, in the feeling-as-information theory (Schwarz, 1990; see also Ortony et al., 1990), the feeling is the first state of awareness that informs a person about her own appraisal of the object that triggered the feeling–that is, before her feeling, this person would not know whether or not s/he liked an object (i.e., evaluated an object as positive or negative). Considered from the perspective of such emotion theories, a person’s uncertainty about the true affect-origin in general, and the unawareness of the true affect-origin in particular, could be favorable side conditions of a misattribution of affective responses to alternative objects than the true affect-origin (cf. Zajonc, 1968; Murphy and Zajonc, 1993; Payne et al., 2010). Over the course of three experiments, we tested this hypothesis. We primed affective responses by distractors of which our participants were unaware (i.e., with visually masked distractors) or aware (i.e., with clearly visible distractors) and tested whether participants’ unawareness of the masked distractors as the true affect-origins is a favorable precondition for misattributions of affective responses away from the masked distractors and toward neutral objects in close temporal vicinity. In our experiments, we used response priming to elicit affective responses (cf. Fritz and Dreisbach, 2013; see also van Steenbergen et al., 2010). In each trial of our experiments, participants had to discriminate between the orientations of a centrally presented target. If the current trial’s target was a square, participants had to press one key, and if the target was a diamond, they had to press another key. Prior to the central target, we presented two distractors at target-adjacent positions. In congruent trials, the distractor was of the same shape as the target and, thus, indicated the same response as the target. In incongruent trials, the distractor was of the alternative shape as compared to the target and, thus, led to response conflict between distractor and target. In this experimental situation, past research has demonstrated that, in comparison to congruent distractors, incongruent distractors delay the response to the target. This response-priming effect has been found with conscious distractors, of which participants were aware (Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974; Gratton et al., 1988), and with non-conscious distractors, of which participants were not aware (Schwarz and Mecklinger, 1995). However, with non-conscious distractors, this response-priming effect is typically weaker than with conscious distractors (Tapia et al., 2010). Critically, in incongruent conditions a response conflict also elicits more negative affective responses than in congruent conditions where a response conflict is absent. This affective priming effect is measured in evaluations of neutral symbols that follow the distractor and the target in close temporal vicinity. Affective priming of neutral symbols through response conflict has hitherto been demonstrated with conscious distractors in a Stroop paradigm only (Fritz and Dreisbach, 2013). In their experiment, participants showed more negative ratings of a neutral Chinese symbol if presented after an incongruent Stroop (a mismatch between a color word and the print color of the word, e.g., GREEN printed in red) than after a congruent (GREEN printed in green) Stroop. Studies showing that affective priming of neutral objects have sometimes been ascribed to misattributions of affective responses away from the eliciting stimulus and toward the neutral symbol or object (Payne et al., 2005). Here, we tested this misattribution explanation of affective priming. If misattributions account for affective priming, affective priming could be stronger with non-conscious than with conscious affect-origins. The reason is that with conscious affect-origins, participants are well aware of degree of the distractor-target incongruence as the true affect-origin. This makes it less likely that the participants misattribute the same affective response elicited by the distractor-target pair also to a different neutral symbol following the distractor and target (cf. Oikawa et al., 2011). In contrast, with non-conscious affect-origins, participants are not aware of the distractor-target incongruence as the true affect-origin. This could foster the misattribution of the distractor-elicited affective response to the neutral symbol that follows the distractor and target. In other words, affective priming effects for a neutral symbol Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org March 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 453 | Goller et al. Non-conscious Processing and Affect Misattributions could be stronger with non-conscious distractors than with conscious distractors, despite the fact that response priming could be stronger with conscious distractors than with non- conscious distractors. Together, these expectations thus amount to the prediction of a double dissociation between response priming and affective priming by non-conscious and conscious distractors. EXPERIMENT 1 The aim of our study was to assess the influence of conscious and non-conscious conflict on the evaluation of a neutral symbol. Conflict was elicited by target-distractor congruence in a flanker task (Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974). We chose a flanker task because non-conscious conflict is established very well in this task (Schwarz and Mecklinger, 1995; Tapia et al., 2010) and is less controversial than with other congruence tasks (e.g., Stroop tasks, see Kouider and Dupoux, 2004). To measure affective priming, participants additionally rated a neutral Chinese symbol as positive or negative at the end of some trials. If target-distractor incongruence elicits more negative affective responses than target-distractor congruence and if these affective responses are (sometimes) misattributed, we expected more negative evaluations of the symbols in incongruent than congruent trials. Furthermore, a failure to perceive the true affect- origin could increase the likelihood of misattributions, resulting in more frequent affect misattributions following non-conscious than conscious distractors (cf. Murphy and Zajonc, 1993). At the end of each block, we also measured the participants’ awareness of the distractors. This was done to ensure that our participants were indeed not aware of the masked, non-conscious distractors, as well as to ensure that our participants were aware of the clearly visible, conscious distractors. In this awareness test, we applied the chance-level performance criterion of unawareness (Klotz and Neumann, 1999; Schmidt and Vorberg, 2006). In each trial of the awareness test, participants had to decide if they though the