NEW LOOK-3 - UNCONSCIOUS COGNITION RECLAIMED

Recent research has established several empirical results that are widely agreed to merit description in terms of unconscious cognition. These findings come from experiments that use indirect tests for immediate or long-term residues of barely perceptible, perceptible-but-unattended, or attended-but-forgotten events. Importantly, these well-established phenomena-insofar as they occur without initially involving focal attention-are limited to relatively minor cognitive feats. Unconscious cognition is now solidly established in empirical research, but it appears to be intellectually much simpler than the sophisticated agency portrayed in psychoanalytic theory. The strengthened position of unconscious cognitive phenomena can be related to their fit with the developing neural network (connectionist) theoretical framework in psychology.