The Mediating Effects of Psychological Capital Between Undergraduate Nursing Students' Professional Commitment and Academic Procrastination.

This report describes a replication of a critical experiment in cognitive psychology. The experiment is from Vorberg et al. (), and it provides the best behavioral evidence to date for separate processing streams for conscious visual perception and unconscious motor control. These authors used a priming setup that leverages , a robust visual masking phenomenon where the target stimulus—in this case called the prime—does not spatially overlap with the subsequent mask. We describe metacontrast masking in detail subsequently, but for now, it is sufficient to know that for very brief inter-stimulus intervals (ISI), adding more time between the prime and mask paradoxically decreases the visibility of the prime (Bridgeman, ; Francis, ). The Vorberg et al. experiment worked as follows: In the first phase, participants identified the orientation of a prime, and increasing ISI decreased the prime visibility. In the second phase, participants identified the orientation of a mask, and increasing ISI increased the priming effect. The Vorberg et al. experiment revealed a striking crossover interaction between prime visibility and priming effect: As the ISI increased, prime visibility decreased while priming effect increased, such that the least visible primes produced the largest priming effects. This crossover interaction is important because it is nonremovable (Wagenmakers et al., ), which means it cannot be eliminated by monotonic transformations of the dependent variables, for example, changing the measurement scale. Moreover, the crossover interaction is interpretable (Loftus, ) because prime visibility decreases while the priming effect increases across the same manipulation. In this case, the straightforward interpretation is that the opposing effects of ISI implicate distinct processing streams. The processing stream mediating conscious visual perception must be distinct from the processing stream mediating motor priming. The Vorberg et al. result strikes us as the best current behavioral evidence for the separation between conscious and unconscious processing streams. The more conventional approach is to show where stimuli which cannot be detected nonetheless subsequently affect behavior (e.g., Dehaene et al. (); Van Opstal et al. ()). Some readers may be content with subliminal priming studies, but they remain broadly controversial. One problem is statistical: establishing evidence that performance is at floor is challenging (Dosher, ; Merikle & Reingold, ; Rouder et al., ; Vadillo et al., ). This problem is even more pronounced in practice because for any masking setup, people vary greatly in performance. Consequently, researchers must assess subliminality for each individual rather than at the group level via a hierarchical approach (Morey et al., ). Schimmack () note excessive publication bias where null subliminal priming results are not represented in the literature (see also Bartoš and Schimmack (). Pratte and Rouder () worry about a task-difficulty artifact. Participants find the priming task very easy; after all, they see the target, and it is straightforward to respond correctly to it. They also find the prime detection task very difficult, as performance here is at or near floor by design. Pratte and Rouder () wondered if this subjective experience of poor performance affected motivation and attention. In one condition, these authors placed hard-to-see stimuli in where all stimuli were hard to see. They also placed the same hard-to-see stimuli in with several easy-to-see stimuli. The hard-to-see stimuli were responded to at chance in the pure blocks but were responded to substantially above chance in mixed blocks. Participants seemingly lost interest and motivation in blocks where they were performing poorly. Accordingly, the assessment of subliminality may artifactually reflect a loss of interest and motivation selectively in prime detection.