Anthony Marcel is a British psychologist who contributed to the early debate on the nature of unconscious perceptual processes in the 1970s and 1980s.
Marcel argued in favour of an unconscious mind that "…automatically re-describe(s) sensory data into every representational form and to the highest levels of description available to the organism.
Marcel is known within the study of unconscious phenomenon for two publications in a 1983 issue of Cognitive Psychology demonstrating unconscious perception and investigating the effects of masking; a process designed to interrupt, prevent or stop perceptual processing.
[4] Marcel notably used dichoptic stimulus-onset asynchrony pattern masking to show that as the interval between presentations of a target stimulus and following mask is reduced, subjects progressively lost information regarding the target stimulus.
Although the cognitive revolution had made cognitive psychology a respectable field of study, the schism between academic psychology and psychoanalysis ensured that terms associated with psychoanalysis, such as "subliminal" and "unconscious," remained highly stigmatised.
Marcel was able to overcome this stigma by framing his findings in the context of existing and accepted cognitive work.
Marcel began the research that would eventually lead him to unconscious perception in the early 1970s, with his work initially rooted in reading.
[6][7] The experiments detailed in Marcel’s 1983 publications were prompted by unexpected findings in masked reading tasks with school children.
At that time, Marcel was working with neurological patients who showed deep dyslexia, and was interested in their errors involving associatively or semantically related words (e.g. sleep and dream).
[9] He noticed the children making errors that indicated the masked words were acting as priming stimuli.
This was suggestive of unconscious perception and therefore contrary to the theories and masking literature of the time.
Most notably, Daniel Holender’s 1986 publication[11] criticised all prior unconscious priming experiment, particularly Marcel’s.
[12] Holender took issue with the direct measures used in experiments purporting to demonstrate unconscious perception and claimed that establishing indirect effects in the absolute absence of direct effects was required to demonstrate SSA (subliminal semantic activation).
Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear, Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic, 1999, 273–299.)
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Neuropsychologia, 42, 1749–1767 Marcel, A.J., Mackintosh, B., Postma, P., Cusack, R., Vuckovich, J., Nimmo-Smith, I., and Cox, S.M.L.
Structured Perceptual Input Imposes an Egocentric Frame of Reference: Pointing, Imagery and Spatial Self-Consciousness.
TMS over right posterior parietal cortex induces neglect in a scene-based frame of reference.