There is no dispute over the existence of functions and processes that operate outside consciousness. No one knows what his or her liver is doing, and we all shed a tear when Lassie comes home, even though we know we are watching a movie with a dog who responds to off‐camera signals. Where matters become interesting (and contentious) is over such issues as whether unconscious processes are routinized and inflexible – in a word, stupid – or whether they can be (...) seen as sophisticated, flexible, and adaptive – in a word, intelligent. In the cognitive sciences, until recently, the former perspective dominated for reasons which are rooted not in any objective data base, but in philosophical considerations. The long‐standing presumption of a not‐very‐bright unconscious is, we suspect, the end product of a continuing adherence to Lockean and Cartesian epistemic traditions. While proponents of these two orientations didn't agree on much, they were of one mind with regard to the proposition that that which is mental is conscious. Contemporary psychologists and philosophers who feel comfortable with this position tend to view unconscious cognitive processes as low‐level, crude, primitively connectionistic, and rather stupid, since they equate sophisticated control operations with the functions of consciousness. (shrink)

The material in "TCU," as we've come to refer to this volume, began as a Master's Thesis that examined the manner in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material could be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what had been learned. It was dubbed implicit learning and, over a fifty-plus year span, became a vigorously researched area in the social sciences. TCU brings together several dozen scientists from a variety of backgrounds (...) and presents a broad (and deep) overview of how the exploration of the cognitive unconscious grew from that first study to a domain of research to which contributions have been made by sociologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, modelers, social and organizational psychologists, sport psychologists, primatologists, developmentalists, linguists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and measurement and assessment researchers. The core message seems fairly straightforward. Unconscious, implicit cognitive processes play a role in virtually everything interesting that human beings do. The implicit and explicit elements of cognition form a rich and complex interactive framework that make up who we are. The volume has contributions from over 30 distinguished authors from nine different countries and gives a balanced and thorough overview of where the field is today, a bit over a half-century since the first experiments were run. (shrink)