Unconscious acoustical stimuli effects on event-related potentials in humans

Unconscious perception essentially affects human behavior. The main results in this area were obtained in experiments with visual stimuli. However, the acoustical stimuli play a not less important role in behavior. The main idea of this study is the electroencephalographic investigation of unconscious acoustical stimulation effects on electro-physiological activity of the brain. For this purpose, the event-related potentials were acquired under unconscious stimulus priming paradigm. The one syllable, three letter length, Russian words and quasi-words with single letter substitution were used as primes and targets. As a result, we find out that repetition and alternative priming similarly affect the event-related component with 200 ms latency after target application in frontal parietal and temporal areas. Under alternative priming the direction of potential amplitude modification nearby 400 ms was altered for word and semi-word targets. Alternative priming reliably increases ERP amplitude in 400 ms locality w