Subliminal Disambiguation does not Influence One-Shot Perceptual Learning

Perception is an active process emerging from the interaction between incoming bottom-up sensory inputs and projected top-down internal priors. Priors are generally formed after repeated exposure to a stimulus. An exception is Mooney images disambiguation, a case of One-Shot Perceptual Learning. Mooney images are black and white images, without apparent meaning. However, single exposure to the real image, process known as disambiguation, is sufficient to associate the original figure and the Mooney. Disambiguation is typically achieved by clear presentation of the image. Existent literature suggest that aware or clear presentation of the unambiguous figure may not mandatory for Mooney disambiguation to occur. However, classically, disambiguation is only assessed asking participants for explicit subjective recognition. The objective of this study was to assess whether also the implicit recognition of Mooneys could be improved by the subliminal presentation of unambiguous images. Concretely, Mooneys were subliminally disambiguated and subjective recognition rates were obtained. Additionally, implicit recognition was measured in a task where participants indicated whether a red dot was located on or off Money images. No evidence was found supporting facilitation by subliminal priming in the implicit task. Nevertheless, subliminal disambiguation did influence subjective recognition. These results constitute one of the first experiments exploring potential alternatives to induce Mooney disambiguation.