At the mercy of prior entry: Prior entry induced by invisible primes is not susceptible to current intentions.

If one of two events is attended to, it will be perceived earlier than a simultaneously occurring unattended event. Since 150 years, this effect has been ascribed to the facilitating influence of attention, also known as prior entry. Yet, the attentional origin of prior-entry effects¹ has been repeatedly doubted. One criticism is that prior-entry effects might be due to biased decision processes that would mimic a temporal advantage for attended stimuli. Although most obvious biases have already been excluded experimentally (e.g. judgment criteria, response compatibility) and prior-entry effects have shown to persist (Shore, Spence, & Klein, 2001), many other biases are conceivable, which makes it difficult to put the debate to an end. Thus, we approach this problem the other way around by asking whether prior-entry effects can be biased voluntarily. Observers were informed about prior entry and instructed to reduce it as far as possible. For this aim they received continuous feedback