ABSTRACT 

Several recent studies have demonstrated that unconsciously perceived stimuli can influence behavior and performance in different tasks which do not require conscious recollection of the content and the context of encoding. Three experiments were constructed in order to evaluate the impact of subliminal stimulation on implicit memory test. In the first experiment we proved that subliminal priming, when occurs after a conscious encoding, produces a significant improvement of implicit retrieval performance without changing explicit memory performance. The result is an additional argument for explicit-implicit dissociation. The following two experiments confirm the possibility of semantic processing of subliminally stimuli and emphasize qualitative and quantitative differences between perceptual identification and lexical decision related to their senzitivity to subliminal stimulation. These results can be considered as a strong counter-argument for the thesis of modularity of mind thesis, and suggest an possible alternative to classify the implicit memory tests.

KEYWORDS: implicit memory, subliminal perception, level of processing.