ABSTRACT

As recently as the mid - 1980, the word unconscious was a taboo in many cognitive journals and books. Instead, in the last two decades cognitive psycholgists have been increasinly willing to discus theories of unconscious cognition. This receptivenes is associated with a series of methodological advances that have led to an increasing variety of demonstration of unconscious cognition. The present article is focused on methodological issues related with subliminal pereception investigations. Three main methodological requiremnts are disscused: modalities of subliminal stimulation, objectives measures of subliminal effects and the need of unambiguos methods in order to diferentiate beetwen aware and unaware states in perception. Each requirement is ilustrated by prototipical experiments.

KEYWORDS: subliminal perception, unconscious cognition, implicit systems