Awareness, False Recognition, and the Jacoby-Whitehouse Effect

Replication is made of Jacoby and Whitehouse's (1989) findings that short duration context stimuli induced false recognition of test stimuli when the 2 events matched one another, but that the reverse was true of longer duration context stimuli (i.e., matching led to fewer false-as well as true-old responses). Although they claimed their results supported unconscious perception, short exposure in this article was clearly supraliminal, that is, subjects judged the relation between context and test stimuli far in excess of chance. Two specific, nonsubliminal mechanisms that could produce the Jacoby-Whitehouse effect are that lengthening the context stimulus duration makes it more likely that test and context stimuli will be perceived as a group; from an integral, rather than separable, composite; or both.