Individuals take in more stimuli from their environment than they can consciously attend to at any given moment. The brain is constantly processing all the stimuli it is exposed to, not just those that it consciously attends to. Unconscious perception involves the processing of sensory inputs that are not selected for conscious perception. The brain takes in these unnoticed signals and interprets them in ways that influence how individuals respond to their environment.

Priming

The perceptual learning of unconscious processing occurs through priming. Priming occurs when an unconscious response to an initial stimulus affects responses to future stimuli. One of the classic examples is word recognition, thanks to some of the earliest experiments on priming in the early 1970s: the work of David Meyer and Roger Schvaneveldt showed that people decided that a string of letters was a word when the letters followed an associatively or semantically related word. For example, NURSE was recognized more quickly when it followed DOCTOR than when it followed BREAD. This is one of the simplest examples of priming. When information from an initial stimulus enters the brain, neural pathways associated with that stimulus are activated, and a second stimulus is interpreted through that specific context.

Experience affects the activation of neural networks

When information from an initial stimulus enters the brain, neural pathways associated with that stimulus are activated, and the stimulus is interpreted in a specific manner.

One example of priming is in the childhood game Simon Says. Simon is able to trick the players because of priming. By saying "Simon says touch your nose," "Simon says touch your ear," and so on, participants are primed to follow the "Simon says" direction and are likely to slip up when that phrase is omitted because they expect it to be there.

In another example, individuals in a study were primed with neutral, polite, or rude words prior to an interview with an investigator. Priming the participants with words prior to the interview activated the neural circuits associated with reactions to those words. The participants who had been primed with rude words interrupted the investigator most often, and those primed with polite words did so the least often.

Subliminal Stimulation

The presentation of an unattended stimulus can prime our brains for a future response to that stimulus. This process is known as subliminal stimulation. A number of studies have examined how unconscious stimuli influence human perception. Researchers, for example, have demonstrated how the type of music that is played in supermarkets can influence the buying habits of consumers. In another study, researchers discovered that holding a cold or hot beverage prior to an interview can influence how the individual perceives the interviewer. While subliminal stimulation appears to have a temporary effect, there is no evidence yet that it produces an enduring effect on behavior.