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Unconscious Cognition Author's personal copy Unconscious Cognition J F Kihlstrom, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA ã 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Glossary Inattentional blindness – Failure to consciously perceive an object in the visual Automaticity – The label given to cognitive field because one’s attention is directed and other mental operations that are elsewhere. In various forms of ‘attentional executed outside phenomenal awareness blindness,’ such as repetition blindness, the and voluntary control. Automatic processes attentional blink, and change blindness, contrast with controlled processes in terms of the subject fails to perceive an object (or a four canonical features: they are inevitably change in an object) despite the fact that evoked by the presence of a particular attention is properly directed to the stimulus; incorrigibly executed, in a ballistic appropriate portion of the visual field. fashion, once evoked; effortless, meaning Learning – A relatively permanent change in that they consume little or no cognitive knowledge which occurs as a result of capacity; and efficient, in that they create little experience. ‘Explicit learning’ covers cases or no interference with other cognitive where the subject is consciously aware of this activities. new knowledge. ‘Implicit learning’ refers to Conscious shyness – The resistance of any effect of acquired knowledge affects psychology and other cognitive sciences to experience, thought, or action in the absence making consciousness a focus of inquiry. As of conscious awareness of what has been described by Owen Flanagan, conscious learned. shyness has four facets: ‘positivistic reserve,’ Limen – In classical psychophysics, the or a preference for publicly verifiable ‘threshold,’ or minimum amount of stimulus behavioral data over introspective self-reports; energy needed for an observer to ‘piecemeal approach,’ the assumption that an consciously detect the presence of, or understanding of consciousness will emerge change in, a stimulus. In ‘subliminal from more narrowly defined studies of perception’ the stimulus is too weak to be perception, memory, and the like; ‘conscious consciously perceived, or has been inessentialism,’ the view that consciousness is degraded by virtue of brief presentation, not necessary for certain cognitive functions, a masking stimulus, or the deployment of such as perceiving and remembering; and attention elsewhere. ‘epiphenomenalism,’ the view that consciousness plays no causal role in Memory – The mental representation of mentallife. some past event. ‘Explicit memory’ entails conscious recollection of some past event, as Dissociation – An experimental outcome in which one independent variable, such as in recall or recognition. ‘Implicit memory’ refers to any effect on experience, thought, or brain damage, has different (e.g., opposite) effects on two or more dependent variables. action of a past event, in the absence of Many studies of unconscious cognition conscious recollection of that event. indicate that some variable (such as brain Perception – The mental representation of damage or the direction of attention) an event in the current stimulus environment, or that of the very recent past. ‘Explicit dissociates, or has different effects on, explicit and implicit expressions of perception’ is indicated by the observer’s perception, memory, and the like. conscious awareness of the size, shape, 411 Encyclopedia of Consciousness (2009), vol. 2, pp. 411-421 Author's personal copy 412 Unconscious Cognition Unconscious Cognition distance, motion, and identity of some stimulus. ‘Implicit perception’ refers to any As psychology developed as an empirical science, effect on experience, thought, or action of theory and research focused on those mental such an event, in the absence of conscious states that were accessible to consciousness, as perception of that event. represented by classical psychophysics (with its Preattentive processes – Perceptual and interest in sensory thresholds), the structuralists’ cognitive operations that occur before method of introspection, and William James’ clas- attention has been paid to a stimulus. sic essay, in the Principles of Psychology, on the Priming – The facilitation (or impairment) of stream of consciousness. Following the onslaught processing of a stimulus (the target) by prior of radical behaviorism, interest in consciousness presentation of another stimulus (the prime). declined precipitously in the years after World In ‘repetition priming,’ the prime physically War I. Woodworth’s work on the span of appre- resembles the target; in ‘semantic priming,’ hension was an exception, and consciousness was the prime and target are related in terms of the subtext of the Gestalt approach to perception. meaning. But serious scientific interest in consciousness had Process-dissociation procedure – to await the cognitive revolution, with its interest A method, invented by Jacoby, for in attention, short-term memory, and mental imag- quantifying the contributions of automatic ery. The widespread current interest in conscious- and controlled processes to task ness is illustrated by the very existence of performance by pitting the one against the encyclopedias like the present one. other. In the ‘Inclusion’ condition, automatic Even in the nineteenth century, however, psy- and controlled processes are allowed to work chologists recognized that the mental structures in the same direction; in the ‘Exclusion’ and processes underlying experience, thought, condition, automatic processes are placed in and action were not completely encompassed opposition to controlled processes. within the span of conscious awareness. Herbart’s Thought – As a verb, thinking refers to ‘limen’ made room for Leibniz’s ‘petites perceptions,’ various cognitive operations, such as and of course Helmholtz argued that conscious reasoning, problem-solving, judgment, and perception was based on unconscious inferences. decision-making. As a noun, thought refers to Perhaps the most forceful advocate of noncon- any mental representation, such as the idea scious mental life was William James, who (again or an image of a thing, which is itself neither a in the Principles) held that mental states could be percept (a mental representation of a unconscious in at least two different senses. First, a stimulus in the current environment) nor a mental event can be deliberately excluded from memory (a mental representation of a past attention or consciousness: ‘‘We can neglect to stimulus). attend to that which we nevertheless feel’’ (p. 201). Unconscious inference – As described by These unattended, unconscious thoughts and feel- Helmholtz, the inferences or thought ings are themselves mental states. Second, and processes that, automatically and more important, James drew on clinical observa- unconsciously, generate conscious tions of cases of hysteria and multiple personality perception from stimulus information. For to argue for a division of consciousness into pri- example, perceivers unconsciously apply the mary and secondary (and, for that matter, tertiary size–distance rule to take information about and more) consciousnesses (sic), only one of which size into account when judging the distance is accessible to phenomenal awareness at any point of an object, and vice-versa, to create the in time. To avoid possible oxymoron in the nega- ‘moon illusion’ and other perceptual effects. tion of consciousness, James preferred to speak of ‘co-conscious’ or ‘subconscious’ mental states, Encyclopedia of Consciousness (2009), vol. 2, pp. 411-421 Author's personal copy Unconscious Cognition 413 rather than ‘unconscious’ ones. There, was, in fact, make it past the filter was not. This same atten- considerable interest in unconscious mental life in tional filter was also the threshold which had to be the early twentieth century – even setting aside the crossed for information to be represented in phe- work of Sigmund Freud. But, as with conscious- nomenal awareness. The filter theories of attention, ness, the entire topic was banished from serious in turn, raised questions about how permeable the discourse by behaviorism. attentional filter was, and how much information History repeated itself in the latter half of the processing could occur preattentively. Was preat- twentieth century, as the ‘consciousness revolu- tentive – preconscious – processing limited to ele- tion’ which followed on the cognitive revolution mentary physical features of the stimulus, or could spun off an interest in unconscious mental life as it extend to the meaning of the stimulus as well? well. This happened slowly. For a long time, if the In part to solve these problems, the notion of an unconscious was discussed at all, it was construed attentional filter was replaced by the notion of merely as a repository for unattended percepts attentional capacity. Capacity theories, such as and forgotten memories. But in addition to this the one proposed by Kahneman in the early wastebasket view of the unconscious, the classic 1970s, began with the assumption that human multistore model of information processing made information-processing capacity is limited, and room for the unconscious by identifying uncon- proposed that the ability to perform one or more scious mental life with early, ‘preattentive’ mental task(s) depended both on the resources available processes that occur prior to the formation of and the resources required by the task(s) them- a mental representation of an event in primary
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