Subliminal Primes Bias the Spatial Locus of Involuntary Object Naming in a Two-Object Reflexive Imagery Task
Certain conscious contents--such as the covert name of a viewed object--arise involuntarily and resist suppression, a phenomenon captured by the Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT). Whether a subliminal prime can bias which of two simultaneously present objects captures such an involuntary naming response has not been established. We adapted a two-object RIT into a self-contained, browser-based instrument. Thirty-eight adults (M age = 21.6 years, SD = 2.3; 26 female) viewed 24 object pairs and were instructed to fixate a central cross, to refrain from thinking of the objects names, and to click an object whenever its name intruded into awareness. On each trial a masked prime (17 ms, flanked by pattern masks) was either the exact name of one object (Exact Word Prime), a semantic associate of one object (Semantic Prime), or a neutral string (No Prime), defining a primed side per trial. A post-experiment debriefing confirmed that participants noticed the masks but none consciously perceived or could identify the prime words, indicating that the primes were subliminal. Analyses excluded 91 of 912 trials (10.0%) with more than five clicks. The priming effect was robust across measures: an omnibus comparison of clicks across conditions was significant (Friedman {chi}{superscript 2}(2) = 6.59, p = .037); within both prime conditions participants clicked the primed side more than the not-primed side (Exact Word, p = .039; Semantic, p = .005); and the primed-to-not-primed ratio exceeded parity by roughly 57-59% (Laplace-smoothed ratio {approx} 1.58; one-sample Wilcoxon p < .001 for each). A Bayesian Poisson generalized linear mixed model with random participant intercepts confirmed a credible primed-side advantage (incidence rate ratio = 1.72, 95% credible interval [1.57, 1.90]) that did not differ between prime types. No general left/right response bias emerged. An exploratory ight-side x Exact Word Prime interaction was inconsistent across model classes and is reported as hypothesis-generating. The findings indicate that subliminal lexical and semantic primes can steer the spatial locus of involuntary object naming.