Online research in philosophy

I argue that Perruchet & Vinter's claim that representations are conscious, and processes unconscious, gives too much ground to the cognitive unconscious; and that the boundary between conscious and unconscious mental phenomena is unlikely to fall neatly along these lines. I also propose that in the absence of more detailed models that demonstrably provide a reasonable account of the data, claims that associative mechanisms may underlie all cognition are premature.

The idea that cognitive processes can be meaningfully classified as conscious or unconscious has a long history in philosophy and psychology (see Ellenberger 1970: Erdelyi 1985; Perry and Laurence 1984, for reviews). However, even though many experimental reports during the past 100 years claim to demonstrate perception, Ieaming, or memory without conscious awareness, the distinction between conscious and unconscious ’ processes remains highly controversial. For example, the same empirical findings that Holender 1986 concludes provide little or no evidence for unconscious perception are considered by other reviewers (e.g. Dixon 1981) as conclusive and overwhelming documentation of the validity of perception without awareness.

The process-dissociation procedure has been used in a variety of experimental contexts to assess the contributions of conscious and unconscious processes to task performance. To evaluate whether motivation affects estimates of conscious and unconscious processes, participants were given incentives to follow inclusion and exclusion instructions in a perception task and a memory task. Relative to a control condition in which no performance incentives were given, the results for the perception task indicated that incentives increased the participants' ability to exclude previously presented information, which in turn both increased the estimate of conscious processes and decreased the estimate of unconscious processes. However, the results also indicated that incentives did not influence estimates of conscious or unconscious processes in the memory task. The findings suggest that the process-dissociation procedure is relatively immune to influences of motivation when used with a memory task, but that caution should be exercised when the process-dissociation is used with a perception task.

This commentary suggests that there are two distinct types of interacting cognitive processes. Conscious processes emerge from unconscious processes. The key problem of SOC is that it uses an overly narrow notion of the “cognitive unconscious” to show that the “cognitive unconscious” is not necessary. Yet, it has little to say about the roles of conscious and unconscious processes in general.