Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 41, April 2016, Pages 177-188
Consciousness and Cognition

Conscious contents as reflexive processes: Evidence from the habituation of high-level cognitions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.02.012Get rights and content

Highlights

  • It has been proposed that conscious contents often arise from reflex-like processes.

  • If so, high-level conscious contents should habituate as reflexes do.

  • We used the Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT) to investigate this possibility.

  • In the RIT, high-level conscious contents (subvocalizations) arise automatically.

  • We found that, as predicted, the RIT effect habituates after repeated stimulation.

Abstract

Reflexes are often insuppressible, predictable, and susceptible to external control. In contrast, conscious thoughts have been regarded as whimsical, ‘offline,’ and shielded from external control. Recent advances suggest that conscious thoughts are more reflex-like and susceptible to external control than previously thought. In one paradigm, high-level conscious thoughts (subvocalizations) are triggered by external control, as a function of external stimuli and experimenter-induced action sets. It has been hypothesized that these conscious contents are activated involuntarily and in a reflex-like manner. If such is the case, then these activations should possess a well-known property of the reflex: habituation. Accordingly, we found that involuntary high-level cognitions (subvocalizations) habituated (i.e., were less likely to arise) after repeated stimulation. As in the case of the habituation of a reflex, this novel effect was stimulus-specific. We discuss the implications of this finding for theories about consciousness and about psychopathological phenomena involving undesired, involuntary cognitions.

Section snippets

Participants

San Francisco State University students (n = 44; 32 females; MAge = 22.3 years, SE = 0.84) participated for course credit. The involvement of human participants in our project was approved by the Institutional Review Board at San Francisco State University.

Stimuli and Apparatus

Stimuli were presented on an Apple iMac computer monitor (50.8 cm) with a viewing distance of approximately 48 cm. Stimulus presentation was controlled by PsyScope software (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993). All questions and instructions

Results

We replicated the RIT effect of Allen et al. (2013): During the first presentation (i.e., instantiation = 1) of a visual stimulus, involuntary subvocalizations occurred on a high proportion of the trials (M = .77, SD = .25, SE = .04), a proportion that was significantly different from zero, t(43) = 20.89, p < .0001. The same significant effect was found with arcsine transformations of the proportion data, t(43) = 21.87, p < .0001. (Arcsine transformations are often used to statistically normalize data that are

Discussion

The view that the generation of conscious contents is protected from external control has dominated both lay and scientific circles. Recent theoretical developments (e.g., Firestone and Scholl, in press, Morsella et al., in press) and experimental evidence (e.g., Allen et al., 2013) suggest that, contrary to this prevalent view, the generation of conscious contents is usually automatic and reflex-like. (These current developments are consistent with Fodor, 1983, Helmholtz, 1856, Lashley, 1956,

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Center for Human Culture and Behavior at San Francisco State University. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Pooya Razavi.

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