What are the boundaries of unconscious semantic cognition?

摘要

What are the scope and the limits, if any, of unconscious cognition? Can the human mind access to the meaning of a printed word without any awareness of the stimulus? During the last 20 years, evidence supporting the existence of unconscious semantic processing of words has accumulated (for a short review, see Naccache, 2008). But still, many questions remain unanswered. How deep can these processes occur? Can multiple words, sets of words or complex syntactic structures such as sentences be processed unconsciously? Can multiple meanings of polysemous words be represented unconsciously?