Conscious Thoughts from Reflex-Like Processes
Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1318–1331 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog Conscious thoughts from reflex-like processes: A new experimental paradigm for consciousness research ⇑ Allison K. Allen a, Kevin Wilkins b, Adam Gazzaley c,d, Ezequiel Morsella a,d, a Departments of Psychology and Philosophy, San Francisco State University, United States b Department of Psychology, Boston College, United States c Departments of Psychiatry and Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, United States d Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, United States article info abstract Article history: The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from Received 6 March 2013 external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur pre- Keywords: dictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have pro- Consciousness posed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises Ironic processing reliably via external control. We introduce the Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in Imagery which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unin- Unconscious processes Implementation intentions tentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants Action sets reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is consid- ered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream.
[Show full text]