their auditory capacities are redirected to another dimension of perceptual awareness. This shows that we do process information outside of our immediate conscious experience. Similar to visual perception, auditory perception also enhances and supplements our experience by searching out and extracting meaningful information from our environment. The auditory findings are further concretized by research on shadowing tasks (Cherry, 1966). These tasks involve two distinct auditory messages presented simultaneously to both ears. One message in one ear is supposed to be shadowed (repeated) while the other message in the other ear is supposed to be ignored. Participants generally perform well at repeating familiar messages in the attended channel. However, when there was a significant change in frequency in the message in the unattended channel, it was detected; moreover, when their names were presented in the unattended channel, they noticed that as well. These shadowing tasks reinforce the idea that the gap between knowledge and experience is explained by our innate perceptual capacities that enhance our experience and optimize our knowledge gained from our environment. Subliminal priming There is also the subject of subliminal priming (Nisbett & Ross, 1980), in which a stimulus is perceived outside of conscious awareness. For example, in an experiment, half of a class was presented with a picture of a boy holding a birthday cake, while the other half was presented with a different picture of the same boy holding a birthday cake. The sole difference between the two was that in the first picture the boy had a mischievous facial expression, while in the second he conveyed an innocent smile. The photos were presented in a flash of 100 ms, then another picture was presented to both groups with the boy smiling. Results were that the first group described him as devilish and naughty, and the second group depicted him as angelic and kind. Due to the short presentation of the pictures, the subjects were not consciously aware of the nature of the original photos and when presented with them afterwards, participants were surprised. These studies point to the fact that even though we only attend to and process limited information, we have a vast amount of knowledge at our disposal through our highly unrestricted sensory registers. It is the selective attention, perception, and higher order cognitive processing that limits these inputs and it is precisely these processes that make up our conscious awareness. Thus, in