Does Unconscious Information Affect Cognitive Behavior

Daryna Bashynska
Nancy Olson
PSY237
October 3, 2015
Does Unconscious Information Affect Cognitive Activity?

1. A) Unconscious information is perceived and undergoes further processing but when it comes to different types of categories of unconscious information (subliminal signals, unnoticed meanings of polysemanticity, and ignored distractors), then the effect is different on present cognitive activities.
B) While seeing subliminal information, activation in memory takes place, which means that you finish tasks faster when they are connected with subliminal information.
C) Even though distractors & unconscious meanings are similar because they both have a negative effect on present cognitive activity, they both have differences as well.

They make tasks more difficult when they are related to them. Then there are unperceived meanings of polysemantic information that complicate not only the solution of the task that is related to them, but also thinking-related activities. There was one study where participants had to name the color of the word even thought the word might have been a different color. And then there was also an experiment where the word and color were the same. They came to a conclusion that it took participants way longer to read the first list of words. The first part showed the effect of negative priming which shows how the distractor

This topic influences every single person in everyday life. Subliminal information is everywhere and people might not even know it. It affects the way you do things and the way you take things in. Distractions are also everywhere and according to this study, they do make it difficult for us to get things done.
Short-term effects include things such what we see or believe at the moment when these things come into play. Unconscious information really does affect cognitive activity short term especially.
Long-term effects are also a big part of this. Perceiving unconscious information does affect cognitive activity because as was mentioned, the priming effect, shows us how one stimulus can lead us to another outcome just based on an old perceived stimulus which is usually from our unconscious because we are not aware that exactly that certain thing lead us to one specific behavior even though it certainly did. So that information that is “stored” in your unconscious is always going to affect you long-term because it will keep leading you to do certain things certain ways. I feel like this is relevant because people are interested in what causes them to do certain things or what affects them during cognitive activities. It’s interesting to find out the way we think and what can affect us as