Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has established that conscious stimuli can lead to non-conscious predictions. Yet, it also suggeststhat conscious awareness of stimuli is a necessary condition for using them in predictions. We use subliminal movement – withand without obstacles – to examine predictions from subliminal stimuli. In four experiments, a moving object was masked withcontinuous flash suppression. After the object had stopped moving, a conscious probe appeared in a location that was eitherconsistent with the movement or not. In the first three experiments the movement was linear, and non-conscious predictionswere based on both direction and speed of movement. In Experiment 4, the moving object collided with an obstacle. Responsetimes revealed predictions on the deflection route. We thus conclude that humans can use dynamic subliminal information togenerate active predictions about the future