Cognitive Psychology Class Notes
> Consciousness
Automaticity
automatic processing:
- do not require attention
- automatic processes complete themselves without conscious control
- involves parallel processing
- driving a car & listening to the radio
- reading (Stroop task)
controlled processing:
- require attention
- requires conscious control
- driving a car for the first time
a process can be come automatic through extensive practice:
- learning to walk
- learning to drive
- Underwood (1974) - case study of Neville Moray (shadowing expert)
Consciousness
- awareness we have of the outside world and of our perceptions, images, and feelings (Matlin)
Consciousness and Cognition
- often assessed with verbal reports (Ericsson & Simon, 1993)
- but, not always complete (e.g. cannot verbalize process of pattern recognition)
Automaticity and Thought Suppression
- thought suppression:
- making a conscious effort to avoid a particular thought
- requires one to:
- plan to supress a thought
- carry out that plan by suppressing all manifestations of the thought, including the original plan
- therefore, thought suppression seems to involve a state of knowing and not knowing at the same time
- Wegner, Schneider, Carter, and White (1987)
---------- EXAMPLE -----------------
Don't think of a white bear.
In the next five minutes, please verbalize your thoughts as you did before, with one exception. This time, try not to think of a white bear. Every time you say �white bear� or have �white bear� come to mind, though, please ring the bell on the table before you.
Results:
- white bear mentions and bell rings almost always occurred when the subject finished a sentence and was silent
Theoretical Conclusions:
- controlled effort to not think of a white bear
- automatic search for signs of a white bear
- thought suppression is difficult to do and is time consuming
- even when thoughts are supressed, they may return to consciousness with minimum prompting, perhaps to the point of obsessive preoccupations
Practical Applicatons:
- suppression of thought may lead to obsessive thinking over time
- smoking, dieting, obsessive-compulsive disorder
Subliminal Perception
- automatic, unconscious processing of information that has some impact on subsequent behavior
- searching for sex in ice cubes
- information exposed for brief periods or among a lot of "noise" so that focused attention cannot process it completely
- satanic messages in rock music & top-down processing**
Vokey and Read (1985)
- tested listeners' ability to identify the meaning of backward statements ("backward masking")
- each statement fit one of 5 categories: nursery rhymes, Christian, satanic, pornographic, or advertising
- Ss had to identify the category (chance = 20%)
- listeners performed at chance levels (19%)
indicated that they had not analyzed the meaning of backward speech and little if any information is analyzed and stored in a way that it can be explicitly recalled or recognized
- BUT... it may affect our emotional responses despite our inability to explicitly remember the meaning of it
- unconsciously perceived stimuli and affective reactions
Murphy and Zajonc (1993)
- Ss told to rate Chinese ideographs as "good" or "bad" concepts
- BUT... before each ideograph was presented it was preceded by a face
- Ss were presented with smiling faces and scowling faces
- in one group, faces were presented for 4 ms (below level of awareness)
- in another group, faces were presented for 1000 ms (well above the level of awareness) -- Ss were told to ignore faces
Results:
- only the unconsciously perceived faces influenced ratings of the ideographs
- when Ss in the 4 ms group "saw" smiling faces --> "good" concept
- when Ss in the 4 ms group "saw" scowling faces --> "bad" concept
- no difference between types of faces for the 1000 ms group
Conclusions:
- Ss were able to ignore faces and not let them influence their ratings --> controlled processing
- unconsciously perceived faces influenced ratings --> automatic processing
General Conclusions about Consciousness
- not necessary to be aware of incoming information for it to affect our performance
- automatic processing (unlike controlled processing) of information is often related to a lack of conscious awareness
- automatic processing (unlike controlled) of information is often not detected in verbal reports
- we will see more about consciousness in higher level cognitive processing!!