Eugene Hwang & Jeongmi Lee, 2020

Human mind is constantly filtering out information to reduce the cognitive load, and this attention mechanism can take place independently from awareness. Even subliminal stimuli can influence attentional deployment and eye movement behavior. The unconscious shift of attention is a reflexive reaction triggered by subliminal cues, but its effect when applied in dynamic environments was unknown. This study presents a novel technique of utilizing subliminal cues within videos. Experiment 1 replicates the effect of subliminal cues in guiding covert spatial attention of the observer. Experiment 2 demonstrates the effect of subliminal cues in video contexts by manipulating the probability of subliminal cues to guide the viewer’s overt attention.