Most of the research on subliminal persuasion involves a technique known as subliminal priming. This involves flashing a stimulus on a computer screen at such a fast rate that people report seeing only a flash of light even though a word or picture was actually flashed. In control conditions, either a different word/picture or no word/picture is flashed. Strahan, Spencer, and Zanna (2002) asked all participants to not eat or drink for 3 hours prior or their experiment. When participants arrived, they were randomly assigned to either a thirsty condition (i.e., they were not allowed to drink any water) or a nonthirsty condition (i.e., they were allowed to drink as much water as they wanted). Next, words were flashed for 16 millisecond on a computer screen followed by a mask (i.e., a string of letters that makes it even more difficult to see a briefly flashed stimulus).