Cognitive Unconscious

1
Cognitive Unconscious

• The other side of consciousness in cognition

2
Two Sides of Unconsciousness

• Cognitive Unconscious
• No known brain impairment
• Focus on cognitive processing
• Where is transition from conscious to
  unconscious?
• Biological Unconscious
• Brain Injury
• Focus on neural processing
• Where is transition from conscious to unconscious?

3
Five Forms of the Cognitive Unconscious

• Clinical dissociations
• Hypnotic suppression
• Subliminal perception
• Attentional blocking
• Priming

4
Clinical Dissociation

• Dissociative Disorders
• Psychogenic Fugue
• Multiple Personality Disorder
• Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
• Repressed Memory
• False memory syndrome
• Slips-of-the-tongue
• How is your uncle? I dont know, I only see
  him in flagranti (instead of saying en
  passant) after a discussion that involved events
  in flagranti

5
Hypnotic Dissociation

• Post-hypnotic amnesia
• Forgetting of events during hypnosis
• Hypnotic analgesia
• Lack of consciousness of pain stimulus
• Hidden observer

6
Subliminal Perception

• Not the Hidden Persuaders
• Subliminal tapes and backmasking
• Pattern masking tasks
• Attentional focus
• Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) is too brief for
  conscious awareness
• Psychological Thresholds
• Subjective
• Objective

7
Subliminal Perception, cntd

• Measuring a threshold
• Identification threshold depends on willingness
  to give an answer
• Threshold is a statistical construct
• Objective vs. subjective threshold
• Objective threshold is the level at which
  discrimination is at chance
• Subjective threshold is the level at which
  awareness is at chance

8
Nonattended Stimuli

• In a shadowing task, people cannot report more
  than gender or location of nonattended voice
• However, people are affected by the content of
  the nonattended message
• Effect is short-lived

9
Perceptual Defense

• McGinnis study of perceptual defense
• presentations of taboo and nontaboo words
• measurement of threshold
• measurement of GSR (or SCR)

10
Priming

• The (usually) beneficial effect of a prior
  experience of an event on the current processing
• Verbal priming
• stem completion
• fragment completion
• perceptual identification

11
Verbal Priming

• Stem completion
• sto______
• rou______
• Fragment completion
• _ s s _ s _ i _
• f _ _ t l _ _ h _
• Priming

12
Priming, contd

• Characteristics
• Persistent
• Does not depend on awareness
• Does not seem to depend much on cognitive
  diversity