The project has made significant progress in all four WPs:
WP1: Substantiate SUP as a unique trait, demonstrate that it is stable over time and test its mechanisms.
• Given past methodological criticism, we devoted substantial effort to clarifying methodological aspects and establishing best practices that would be used across all studies. This translated into 4 published papers (all in Q1-ranked journals), and two more that have not been published yet (one under review, the other under work). Specifically, we led a consensus paper of over 30 researchers to establish best practices for studying unconscious processes (Stockart et al., accepted, BBS); developed a new calibration procedure for finding individual subliminal thresholds (Elbaz et al., accepted, BRM); tested the effect of training and multi-task on unconscious effects (Fischer et al., accepted, Neurosci. Conscious.); tested whether chance performance in the objective measure can be explained by contamination from the previous target (Elbaz et al., under work); reviewed novel methods for studying conscious and unconscious processing (Mudrik et al., 2024, Neuron); and developed a new statistical approach for testing awareness (Lublinsky et al., under review).
• Extensively piloted the main task until we obtained satisfying results; overall, 150 participants were ran in 5 different behavioral pilots and one EEG pilot.
• Started data collection for Study 1; out of 100 participants, we already collected 20 participants (each coming to 3 separate EEG sessions).
WP2: Inspect the interplay between conscious and unconscious processing and test their mechanisms
• Completed Study 2.1 as planned (N=90; behavioral). The aim was to replicate the preliminary results I obtained prior to submitting the proposal. Surprisingly, the effect did not replicate. We accordingly continued to explore the reasons for this failure to replicate in two additional experiments, one is still being conducted. So far, 35 participants were ran in these experiments. After analyzing the results, we will submit a paper reporting all findings.
• In parallel, we worked on modifying the paradigm given these results so to be able to test the hypotheses using fMRI. We are now starting to pilot the established paradigm.
WP3: Map the developmental trajectory of SUP in childhood and adolescence.
• Developed a video game that is used as a narrated framework for maintaining children’s engagement throughout the experiment.
• Completed Study 3.1(N=40 children) in which we validated the children-adapted awareness measure and tested the meta-cognition task and the cognitive inhibition task. We plan to write a paper introducing the adapted measure, for the use of other researchers.
• We are now running a small pilot on the finalized paradigm, after which the longitudinal Study 3.2.
WP4: Test if SUP is not only stable over time but also over tasks, and test its relations with other traits and cognitive faculties.
• Here too, given the immense effort that will be devoted to running the planned study (300 participants, each coming for 3 sessions of 6 hours each), we wanted to make sure our paradigm is as immune to criticism as possible, relying on past literature, alongside the methodological work described in WP1 that is relevant to all studies in this grant. To that end, we conducted a large-scale meta-analysis of studies of unconscious semantic processing. We are now writing it up for publication. Based on this meta-analysis, and others that we are working on, we created an open science database and website (
https://uncontrustdb.tau.ac.il(opens in new window)) of over 500 published experiments for testing unconscious effects (see section 4 below).
• Run 3 experiments (N=90; behavioral) to validate the main tasks used in the large-scale Study 4.
• Started data collection for Study 4. So far, 75 participants were run. Going beyond the original proposal, we are now also scanning their brain to look for SUP-related anatomical/connectivity patterns.
Additional activities
In addition to the above achievements, in collaboration with two other ERC awardees (Axel Cleeremans and Anil Seth), I have recently published a target paper in Frontiers in Science, entitled “Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?”. Among other points, this paper integrates over the three ERC-funded projects. In parallel, we also explored the use of eye tracking as an additional means for finding evidence for consistent individual differences in unconscious processing, beyond our original proposal. Though we found some meaningful markers, these were not sensitive enough to the content of the suppressed stimuli, so we decided not to further pursue this direction. However, a manuscript reporting these results will be submitted.
