What you saw a while ago determines what you see now: Extending awareness priming to implicit behaviors and uncovering its temporal dynamics

Abstract

Past experiences influence how we perceive and respond to the present. A striking example is awareness priming, in which prior conscious perception enhances visibility and discrimination of subsequent stimuli. In this partially pre-registered study, we address a long-standing debate and broaden the scope of awareness priming by demonstrating its effects on implicit motor responses. Using a large sample size (N = 48) and a novel continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm, we show that prior conscious perception not only boosts subjective visibility, objective discrimination accuracy, but also enhances implicit motor responses of subsequently encountered threshold-level stimuli. Exploratory temporal dynamics analyses confirm the transient nature of awareness priming: It peaks rapidly and decays gradually, even when high-visibility trials, which could shape subsequent perception, persist. This temporal profile sets awareness priming apart from other influences of prior experience, such as serial dependence or perceptual learning. We also make a novel observation: Recent conscious experience enhances discrimination accuracy, whereas more distant experiences primarily improve subjective visibility. These findings suggest that prior conscious perception shapes conscious awareness and discrimination accuracy through independent mechanisms, likely mediated by brain areas with differing temporal receptive windows across the cortical hierarchy. By shedding new light on the scope and temporal dynamics of awareness priming, this work advances our understanding of how previous conscious perception shapes current perception and behavior.