Since Freud and his co-author Breuer spoke of dissociation in 1895, a scientific paradigm was painstakingly established in the field of unconscious cognition. This is the dissociation paradigm. However, recent critical analysis of the many and various reported dissociations reveals their blurred, or unveridical, character. Moreover, we remain ignorant with respect to the ways cognitive phenomena transition from consciousness to an unconscious mode. This hinders us from filling in the puzzle of the unified mind. We conclude that we have reached (...) a Kuhnian crisis in the field of unconscious cognition, and we predict that new models, incorporating partly the relevant findings of the dissociation paradigm—but also of dynamic psychology—, will soon be established. We further predict that some of these models will be largely based on the pairs representation–process and analog–digital. (shrink)

The Serial Reaction Time Task (SRTT) was designed to measure motor sequence learning and is widely used in many fields in cognitive science and neuroscience. However, the common performance measures derived from SRTT—reaction time (RT) difference scores—may not provide valid measures of sequence learning. This is because RT-difference scores may be subject to floor effects and otherwise not sufficiently reflective of learning. A ratio RT measure might minimize floor effects. Furthermore, measures derived from predictive accuracy may provide a better assessment (...) of sequence learning. Accordingly, we developed a Predictive Sequence Learning Task (PSLT) in which performance can be assessed via both RT and predictive accuracy. We compared performance of N = 99 adults on SRTT and PSLT in a within-subjects design and also measured fluid abilities. The RT-difference scores on both tasks were generally not related to fluid abilities, replicating previous findings. In contrast, a ratio RT measure on SRTT and PSLT and accuracy measures on PSLT were related to fluid abilities. The accuracy measures also indicated an age-related decline in performance on PSLT. The current patterns of results were thus inconsistent across different measures on the same tasks, and we demonstrate that this discrepancy is potentially due to floor effects on the RT difference scores. This may limit the potential of SRTT to measure sequence learning and we argue that PSLT accuracy measures could provide a more accurate reflection of learning ability. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have revealed systematic errors in human reasoning. There is disagreement about what these errors indicate about human rationality, but one upshot seems clear: human reasoning does not seem to fit traditional views of human rationality. This concern about rationality has made its way through various fields and has recently caught the attention of philosophers. The concern is that if philosophers are prone to systematic errors in reasoning, then the integrity of philosophy would be threatened. In this paper, I (...) present some of the more famous work in cognitive science that has marshaled this concern. Then I present reasons to think that those with training in philosophy will be less prone to certain systematic errors in reasoning. The suggestion is that if philosophers could be shown to be less prone to such errors, then the worries about the integrity of philosophy could be constrained. Then I present evidence that, according to performance on the CRT (Frederick 2005), those who have benefited from training and selection in philosophy are indeed less prone to one kind of systematic error: irrationally arbitrating between intuitive and reflective responses. Nonetheless, philosophers are not entirely immune to this systematic error, and their proclivity for this error is statistically related to their responses to a variety of philosophical questions. So, while the evidence herein puts constraints on the worries about the integrity of philosophy, it by no means eliminates these worries. The conclusion, then, is that the present evidence offers prima facie reasons to ascribe a mitigated privilege to philosophers' ability to rationally arbitrate between intuitive and reflective responses. (shrink)

This commentary discusses three points: (1) The implications of the fact that it is rational to ignore base rates if probabilities are estimated by frequencies from samples without missing data (natural sampling); (2) second order probabilities distributions are a plausible way to model imprecise probabilities; and (3) Bayesian networks represent a normative reference for multi-cue models of probabilistic inference.

Any instance (i.e., event, behavior, trait) belongs to infinitely many reference classes, hence there are infinitely many base rates from which to choose. People clearly do not entertain all possible reference classes, however, so something must be limiting the search space. We suggest some possible mechanisms that determine which reference class is evoked for the purpose of judgment and decision.

Koehler is right that base rate information is used, to various degrees, both in laboratory tasks and in everyday life. However, it is not time to turn our backs on laboratory tasks and focus solely on ecologically valid decision making. Tightly controlled experimental data are still needed to understandhowbase rate information is used, and how this varies among groups.

Koehler's work will assist the effort to understand legal fact finding. It leaves two questions somewhat open: (i) the extent to which empirical research can measure correctness of fact-finding, a function that involves the resolution of normative questions and (ii) the standards judges should use in the absence of the research he advocates.

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive (...) science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience . From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001. (shrink)

Heuristics of evolutionary biology dictate that phylogenetically older processes are inherently more stable and resilient to disruption than younger processes. On the grounds that non-declarative behaviour emerged long before declarative behaviour, Reber argues that implicit learning is supported by neural processes that are evolutionarily older than those supporting explicit learning. Reber suggested that implicit learning thus leads to performance that is more robust than explicit learning. Applying this evolutionary framework to motor performance, we examined whether implicit motor learning, relative to (...) explicit motor learning, conferred motor output that was resilient to physiological fatigue and durable over time. In Part One of the study a fatigued state was induced by a double Wingate Anaerobic test protocol. Fatigue had no affect on performance of participants in the implicit condition; whereas, performance of participants in the explicit condition deteriorated significantly. In Part Two of the study a convenience sample of participants was recalled following a one-year hiatus. In both the implicit and the explicit condition retention of performance was seen and, contrary to the findings in Part One, so was resilience to fatigue. The resilient performance in the explicit condition after one year may have resulted from forgetting or from consolidation of declarative knowledge as implicit memories. In either case, implicit processes were left to more effectively support motor performance. (shrink)

At the phenomenal level, consciousness can be described as a singular, unified field of recursive self-awareness, consistently coherent in a particualr way; that of a subject located both spatially and temporally in an egocentrically-extended domain, such that conscious self-awareness is explicitly characterized by I-ness, now-ness and here-ness. The psychological mechanism underwriting this spatiotemporal self-locatedness and its recursive processing style involves an evolutionary elaboration of the basic orientative reference frame which consistently structures ongoing spatiotemporal self-location computations as i-here-now. Cognition computes action-output (...) in the midst of ongoing movement, and consequently requires a constant self-locating spatiotemporal reference frame as basis for these computations. Over time, constant evolutionary pressures for energy efficiency have encouraged both the proliferation of anticipative feedforward processing mechansims, and the elaboration, at the apex of the sensorimotor processing hierarchy, of self-activating, highly attenuated recursively-feedforward circuitry processing the basic orientational schema independent of external action output. As the primary reference frame of active waking cognition, this recursive i-here-now processing generates a zone of subjective self-awareness in terms of which it feels like something to be oneself here and now. This is consciousness. (shrink)

A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, (1) between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and (2) between learning that involves the encoding of instances (or fragments) versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Implicit learning is assumed to involve unconscious rule learning. We examine the evidence for implicit learning (...) derived from subliminal learning, conditioning, artificial grammar learning, instrumental learning, and reaction times in sequence learning. We conclude that unconscious learning has not been satisfactorily established in any of these areas. The assumption that learning in some of these tasks (e.g., artificial grammar learning) is predominantly based on rule abstraction is questionable. When subjects cannot report the rules that govern stimulus selection, this is often because their knowledge consists of instances or fragments of the training stimuli rather than rules. In contrast to the distinction between conscious and unconscious learning, the distinction between instance and rule learning is a sound and meaningful way of taxonomizing human learning. We discuss various computational models of these two forms of learning. (shrink)

Processes comparable in important respects to those underlying human conscious and non-conscious processing can be identified in a range of species and it is argued that these reflect evolutionary precursors of the human processes. A distinction is drawn between two types of processing: stimulus-based and higher-order. For ‘higher-order,’ in humans the operations of processing are themselves associated with conscious awareness. Conscious awareness sets the context for stimulus-based processing and its end-point is accessible to conscious awareness. However, the mechanics of the (...) translation between stimulus and response proceeds without conscious control. The paper argues that higher-order processing is an evolutionary addition to stimulus-based processing. The model’s value is shown for gaining insight into a range of phenomena and their link with consciousness. These include brain damage, learning, memory, development, vision, emotion, motor control, reasoning, the voluntary versus involuntary debate, and mental disorder. (shrink)

Koehler's summary and critique of research on the base rate fallacy is cogent and persuasive. However, he may have overstated the case, and his suggestions for future research may be too restrictive. We agree that methodological approaches to this topic should be broadened, but we argue that experimental laboratory research and the Bayesian normative standard are useful and should not be abandoned.

How people learn chunks or associations between adjacent items in sequences was modelled. Two previously successful models of how people learn artificial grammars were contrasted: the CCN, a network version of the competitive chunker of Servan‐Schreiber and Anderson [J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn. 16 (1990) 592], which produces local and compositionally‐structured chunk representations acquired incrementally; and the simple recurrent network (SRN) of Elman [Cogn. Sci. 14 (1990) 179], which acquires distributed representations through error correction. The models' susceptibility to two (...) types of interference was determined: prediction conflicts, in which a given letter can predict two other letters that appear next with an unequal frequency; and retroactive interference, in which the prediction made by a letter changes in the second half of training. The predictions of the models were determined by exploring parameter space and seeing howdensely different regions of the space of possible experimental outcomes were populated by model outcomes. For both types of interference, human data fell squarely in regions characteristic of CCN performance but not characteristic of SRN performance. (shrink)

The mere exposure effect is the increase in positive affect that results from the repeated exposure to previously novel stimuli. We sought to determine if judgments other than affective preference could reliably produce a mere exposure effect for two-dimensional random shapes. In two experiments, we found that brighter and darker judgments did not differentiate target from distracter shapes, liking judgments led to target selection greater than chance, and disliking judgments led to distracter selection greater than chance. These results for brighter, (...) darker, and liking judgments were obtained regardless of whether shape recognition was greater (Experiment 1) or not greater (Experiment 2) than chance. Effects of prior exposure to novel shapes were reliably observed only for affective judgment tasks. These results are inconsistent with general predictions made by the nonspecific activation hypothesis, but not the affective primacy or perceptual fluency hypotheses which were discussed in terms of cognitive neuroscience research. (shrink)

Philosophers, especially in recent years, have engaged in reflection upon the nature of experience. Such reflections have led them to draw a distinction between conscious and unconscious mentality in terms of whether or not it is like something to have a mental state. Reflection upon the history of psychology and upon contemporary cognitive science, however, identifies the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states to be primarily one which is drawn in epistemic terms. Consciousness is an epistemic notion marking the (...) special kind of first-person knowledge we have of our own mental states. Psychologists have found it expedient, for explanatory reasons, to ignore or reject the assumption that we have exhaustive first-person knowledge of our mental states and, in doing so, use the term ‘unconscious’ to indicate the peculiar epistemic status of certain mental states.It is argued that epistemic consciousness is distinct from the subjective-experiential notion of consciousness, from ‘access-consciousness’ and from higher-order thought conceptions of mental state consciousness, and that epistemic consciousness has an important role to play in philosophy of mind and in the history of psychology.Author Keywords: Consciousness; Unconscious mental states; Self-knowledge; History of psychology; Freud; Chomsky. (shrink)

The acquisition of complex motor, cognitive, and social skills, like playing a musical instrument or mastering sports or a language, is generally associated with implicit skill learning . Although it is a general view that SL is most effective in childhood, and such skills are best acquired if learning starts early, this idea has rarely been tested by systematic empirical studies on the developmental pathways of SL from childhood to old age. In this paper, we challenge the view that childhood (...) and early school years are the prime time for skill learning by tracking age-related changes in performance in three different paradigms of SL. We collected data from participants between 7 and 87 years for a Serial Reaction Time Task testing the learning of motor sequences, an Artificial Grammar Learning task testing the extraction of regularities from auditory sequences, and Probabilistic Category Learning in the Weather Prediction task , a non-sequential categorization task. Results on all three tasks show that adolescence and adulthood are the most efficient periods for skill learning, since instead of becoming less and less effective with age, SL improves from childhood into adulthood and then later declines with aging. (shrink)

When base rates are learned and used in an experiential manner subjects show better base rate use, perhaps because the implicit learning system is engaged. A causal framework in which base rates are relevant might also be necessary. Humans might thus perform better on more ecologically valid tasks, which are likely to contain those three components.

The base rate fallacy is directly dependent on a particular judgment paradigm in which information may be unambiguously designated as either “base rate” or “individuating,” and in which subjects make two-stage sequential judgments. The paradigm may be a poor match for real world settings, and the fallacy may thus be undefined for natural ecologies of judgment.

The traditional model of human cognition (TMHC) postulates an ontological and/or structural gap between conscious and unconscious mental representations. By and large, it sees higher-level mental processes as commonly conceptual or symbolic in nature and therefore conscious, whereas unconscious, lower-level representations are conceived as non-conceptual or sub-symbolic. However, experimental evidence belies this model, suggesting that higher-level mental processes can be, and often are, carried out in a wholly unconscious way and/or without conceptual representations, and that these can be processed unconsciously. (...) This entails that the TMHC, as well as the theories on mental representation it motivates and that in turn support it, is wrong. (shrink)

Consciousness is best understood in context, as one element of an interactive waking state in which the greater part of cognitive processing takes place in a nonconscious fashion. But if conscious and nonconscious processing are combined in the waking state, what distinguishes the former form the latter, what is consciousness, and what is its purpose? The answer to the second question depends crucially on our conclusion regarding the first. What is the property in virtue of which a state is conscious (...) rather than nonconscious? In the following, it will be argued that of the answers most frequently proposed—intentionality, subjectivity, accessibility, reflexivity—only the final characteristic, reflexive, autonoetic awareness, is unique to the conscious state. Reflexivity can best be explained not as the product of a self-representational data structure, but as the expression of a recursive processing regime, in which cognition registers the properties of the processing state to a greater extent than properties of the content represented. And the principal characteristic of a reflexive processing state is cognitive reflexivity or autonoetic awareness. (shrink)

Abstract(1) There is enough contradictory evidence regarding the role of base rates in category learning to confirm the nonexistence of biases in such learning. (2) It is not always possible to activate statistical reasoning through frequentist representation. (3) It is necessary to use the concept of systematic processing in reconsidering the published work on biases.

The environment in which humans evolved is strongly and positively autocorrelated in space and time. Probabilistic judgments based on the assumption of independence may not yield evolutionarily adaptive behavior. A number of “faults” of human reasoning are not faulty under fuzzy arithmetic, a nonprobabilistic calculus of reasoning under uncertainty that may be closer to that underlying human decision making.

A recent study showed physicians' reasoning about a realistic case to be ignorant of base rate. It also showed physicians interpreting information pertinent to base rate differently, depending on whether it was presented early or late in the case. Although these adult reasoners might do better if given hints through talk of relative frequencies, this would not prove that they had no problem of base rate neglect.

We have been oversold on the base rate fallacy in probabilistic judgment from an empirical, normative, and methodological standpoint. At the empirical level, a thorough examination of the base rate literature (including the famous lawyer–engineer problem) does not support the conventional wisdom that people routinely ignore base rates. Quite the contrary, the literature shows that base rates are almost always used and that their degree of use depends on task structure and representation. Specifically, base rates play a relatively larger role (...) in tasks where base rates are implicitly learned or can be represented in frequentist terms. Base rates are also used more when they are reliable and relatively more diagnostic than available individuating information. At the normative level, the base rate fallacy should be rejected because few tasks map unambiguously into the narrow framework that is held up as the standard of good decision making. Mechanical applications of Bayes's theorem to identify performance errors are inappropriate when (1) key assumptions of the model are either unchecked or grossly violated, and (2) no attempt is made to identify the decision maker's goals, values, and task assumptions. Methodologically, the current approach is criticized for its failure to consider how the ambiguous, unreliable, and unstable base rates of the real world are and should be used. Where decision makers' assumptions and goals vary, and where performance criteria are complex, the traditional Bayesian standard is insufficient. Even where predictive accuracy is the goal in commonly defined problems, there may be situations (e.g., informationally redundant environments) in which base rates can be ignored with impunity. A more ecologically valid research program is called for. This program should emphasize the development of prescriptive theory in rich, realistic decision environments. (shrink)

A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and between learning that involves the encoding of instances versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Implicit learning is assumed to involve unconscious rule learning. We examine the evidence for implicit learning derived from subliminal learning, (...) conditioning, artificial grammar learning, instrumental learning, and reaction times in sequence learning. We conclude that unconscious learning has not been satisfactorily established in any of these areas. The assumption that learning in some of these tasks is predominantly based on rule abstraction is questionable. When subjects cannot report the “implicitly learned” rules that govern stimulus selection, this is often because their knowledge consists of instances or fragments of the training stimuli rather than rules. In contrast to the distinction between conscious and unconscious learning, the distinction between instance and rule learning is a sound and meaningful way of taxonomizing human learning. We discuss various computational models of these two forms of learning. (shrink)

Setting the two hypotheses of complete neglect and full use of base rates against each other is inappropriate. The proper question concerns the degree to which base rates are used (or neglected), and under what conditions. We outline alternative approaches and recommend regression analysis. Koehler's conclusion that we have been oversold on the base rate fallacy seems to be premature.

The underutilization of base rates is a consistent finding. The strong claim that base rates are ignored has been rejected and this needs no further emphasis. Following the path of “normal science,” research examines the conditions predicting changes in the degree of underutilization. A scientific revolution that might dethrone the heuristics and biases paradigm is not in sight.

More often than not, theories of belief and of belief ascription restrict themselves to conscious beliefs, thus obliterating a vast part of our mental life and offering extremely incomplete, unrealistic theories. Indeed, conscious beliefs are the exception, not the rule, as far as human doxastic states are concerned, and a naturalistic, realistic theory of knowledge that aspires to completeness has to take unconscious beliefs into consideration. This paper is the elaboration of such a theory of belief.

The representational nature of human cognition and thought in general has been a source of controversies. This is particularly so in the context of studies of unconscious cognition, in which representations tend to be ontologically and structurally segregated with regard to their conscious status. However, it appears evolutionarily and developmentally unwarranted to posit such segregations, as,otherwise, artifact structures and ontologies must be concocted to explain them from the viewpoint of the human cognitive architecture. Here, from a by-and-large Classical cognitivist viewpoint, (...) I show why this segregation is wrong, and elaborate on the need to postulate an ontological and structural continuity between unconscious and conscious representations. Specifically, I hypothesize that this continuity is to be found in the symbolic-based interplay between the syntax and the semantics of thought, and I propose a model of human information processing characterized by the integration of syntactic and semantic representations. (shrink)

A serial reaction time experiment tested the hypothesis that there are two independent forms of implicit learning: learning that is linked to making judgments about stimuli, and learning that is linked to motor processing. Participants performed 2, 6, or 12 blocks of single task SRT, dual task SRT, or observation with one of five sequences; each sequence had the same underlying structure. Participants then performed two implicit tests, SRT and pattern judgment, as well as a generation test and an explicit (...) knowledge test. There was a double dissociation of the effect of sequence surface structure on SRT and pattern judgment. SRT and pattern judgment competence developed independently of each other across length of acquisition task. Performance on both implicit tasks did not depend on explicit knowledge. These results indicate that the SRT and pattern judgment measures tap independent forms of implicit learning, which is consistent with the modular nature of memory and cognition. (shrink)

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition (...) scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)