Doesn't it make a difference if it's near the noise floor because it's hard to measure (atoms) or if it's near the noise floor because it's hardly there (masks)? Maybe if these "hardly there" results led to further research that isolated some underlying "very there" phenomena, they would be important, but until that happens, who cares if thinking about money makes you slightly less generous than thinking about flowers? If they're not building on previous research to discover more and more important things, then it doesn't seem like useful progress.