Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:50:02.706Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Better tests of consciousness are needed, but skepticism about unconscious processes is unwarranted

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2014

Ryan Ogilvie  and
Peter Carruthers
Ryan Ogilvie
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. [email protected]@umd.eduhttp://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/
Peter Carruthers
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. [email protected]@umd.eduhttp://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What people report is, at times, the best evidence we have for what they experience. Newell & Shanks (N&S) do a service for debates regarding the role of unconscious influences on decision making by offering some sound methodological recommendations. We doubt, however, that those recommendations go far enough. For even if people have knowledge of the factors that influence their decisions, it does not follow that such knowledge is conscious, and plays a causal role, at the time the decision is made. Moreover, N&S fail to demonstrate that unconscious thought plays no role at all in decision making. Indeed, such a claim is quite implausible. In making these points we comment on their discussion of the literature on expertise acquisition and the Iowa Gambling Task.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 36 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bechara, A., Damasio, H. & Damasio, A. R. (2000) Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex 10:295–307.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cowan, N. (2000) The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24:87–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dehaene, S. (1997) The number sense. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Engle, R. (2002) Working memory capacity as executive attention. Current Directions in Psychological Science 11:19–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurlburt, R. T. & Akhter, S. A. (2006) The descriptive experience sampling method. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5:271–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knudsen, E. (2007) Fundamental components of attention. Annual Review of Neuroscience 30:57–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leuthold, H. & Kopp, B. (1998) Mechanisms of priming by masked stimuli: Inferences from event-related brain potentials. Psychological Science 9:263–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maia, T. V. & McClelland, J. L. (2004) A re-examination of the evidence for the somatic marker hypothesis: What participants really know in the Iowa Gambling Task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102:16075–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prinz, J. (2012) The conscious brain: How attention engenders experience. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rolls, E. (1999) The brain and emotion. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schacter, D. L. (1992) Priming and multiple memory systems: Perceptual mechanisms of implicit memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 4:244–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed