Automatic processing of unattended peripheral words

In the gender congruency (Stroop-like) task, participants are shown a male/female stick figure that appears with either a congruent/incongruent word. Participants were required to identify the figure by a button press as accurately and quickly as possible. Words appeared either separately (Exp. 1) or superimposed on figure (Exp. 2). Figures appeared at 3 or 6 degrees right/left of fixation. Congruent stimuli were responded to faster than incongruent stimuli and the effect was impacted by position of figure relative to fixation, suggesting that the non-monitored peripheral words were processed semantically during fixation. Further confirmation was obtained by using an eye tracker (Exp. 3) where only data in which the subject was fixating at the center was analyzed. To guarantee that subjects did not saccade to the figure, stimuli appeared for only 180 ms. Nonetheless, congruency effects were obtained even when the words appeared at 11 visual degrees eccentricity.