Talk by Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmidt (TU Kaiserslautern): "Unconscious cognition without post-hoc selection artifacts: From selective analysis to functional dissociations"

One of the most popular approaches to unconscious cognition is the technique of “post-hoc selection”: Priming effects and visibility ratings are measured in multitasks on the same trial, and only trials with lowest visibility ratings are selected for analysis of (presumably unconscious) priming effects. In the past, the technique has been criticized for creating statistical artifacts and capitalizing on chance. In our new paper (Schmidt et al., 2026) we argue that post-hoc selection constitutes a sampling fallacy confusing sensitivity and response bias, wrongly ascribing unconscious processing to stimulus conditions that may be far from indiscriminable. In response to a high-profile “best practice” paper by Stockart et al. (2025) that condones the technique, we use standard signal detection theory to show that post-hoc selection only isolates trials with neutral response bias, irrespective of actual sensitivity, and thus fails to isolate trials where the critical stimulus is “unconscious”. Our own data demonstrate that zero-visibility ratings are consistent with uncomfortably high levels of sensitivity. At the same time, we suggest several ways to demonstrate unconscious cognition that neither require genuinely unconscious primes not have to resort to post-hoc selection.

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