The contextual disambiguation of a polysemous word in an unattended message

Multimode theories of attention state that an unattended message is analysed at a semantic level, although less efficiently than an attended message. This experiment was designed to test this. A stimulus (the polysemous word ‘bank’) was presented to subjects in the attended and unattended messages of a dichotic task. One meaning of the word ‘bank’ had previously been associated with electric shock in a context which indicated that the appropriate meaning was a clearing bank (money bank). Specifically, a less efficient analysis of the unattended message would predict that the level of GSR activity would be greatest after the presentation of ‘money bank’ in the attended message, less after presentation of ‘money bank’ in the unattended message, even less after presentation of ‘river bank’ in the unattended message and the lowest level of GSR activity should follow the presentation of ‘river bank’ in the attended message. This prediction was confirmed.