It should be noted that stimulus duration in the backward masking paradigm was short, thus it would be interesting to use other paradigms (e.g., binocular rivalry) to investigate the implicit emotional memory, although the paradigms may rely on different mechanisms [40].
A backward masking paradigm was used.
Using a backward masking paradigm, we asked young-old (aged 59 70), old-old (aged 70+) and younger adults (18 31 years) to perform a go/no-go task, in which they had to respond to images of animals whilst ignoring images of landscapes.
To ensure that participants processed faces unconsciously, the backward masking paradigm was used, and subjective and objective assessments for awareness were adopted for each experiment.
However, in many previous studies using the backward masking paradigm to render stimuli unconscious, the durations are not short enough to ensure that the processing is unconscious [9], [22], [23].
In the backward masking paradigm, a stimulus is usually presented for a short duration, and then replaced by a mask to interrupt visual processing related to the stimulus and thus excludes awareness.
One means of measuring auditory temporal acuity is with a backward masking paradigm in which perceptual thresholds are determined by how loud a tone needs to be for it to be perceived when directly followed by a competing signal (i.e., a masker).
Several studies have reported that the shine-through visual backward masking paradigm meets the characteristics of an endophenotype for schizophrenia [ 28].
Behavioural and autonomic responses indicative of processing along the subcortical route have been recorded using backward masking paradigms.
Thus, future studies are needed to examine whether the use of MVPA will permit to find unconscious information in the frontal lobes, also for the backward masking paradigms (Devlin et al. 2004; Nakamura et al. 2005, 2007).
