Mental Processing Without Awareness

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Research shows that some surgery patients can hear, and later comply with,
instructions or suggestions given while
they were under anesthesia, even though
they have no memory of what they were
told (Bennett, Giannini, & Davis, 1985).
Another study found that people have
physiological responses to emotionally
charged words even when they are not
paying attention to them (Von Wright,
Anderson, & Stenman, 1975). These and
other similar studies provide evidence for
the operation of subconscious mental
processing (Deeprose & Andrade, 2006).
Chapter 4 Consciousness
Removed due to copyright
permissions restrictions.
Some mental events are not conscious but can become conscious, or can influence
conscious experience. These mental events make up the cognitive unconscious (Reber,
1992), which includes the preconscious and the subconscious. Mental events that are
outside awareness but that can easily be brought into awareness are said to exist at the
preconscious level. What did you have for dinner last night? The information you
needed to answer this question was probably not already in your conscious awareness,
but it was at the preconscious level. So when you read the question, you could answer
it immediately. Similarly, when you play trivia games, you draw on your large storehouse of preconscious memories to come up with obscure facts.
Other mental activities can alter thoughts, feelings, and actions but are more difficult to bring into awareness (Ratner, 1994). Sigmund Freud suggested that these unconscious activities, especially those involving unacceptable sexual and aggressive urges,
are actively kept out of consciousness. Most psychologists do not accept Freud’s view,
but they still use the term unconscious, or subconscious, to describe mental activity
that influences us in various ways but that occurs outside of awareness (Dijksterhuis &
Nordgren, 2006.
Mental Processing Without Awareness
preconscious level The level of consciousness at which reside mental
events that are not currently conscious
but can become conscious at will.
unconscious The term used to describe a level of mental activity said by
Freud to contain unacceptable sexual,
aggressive, and other impulses of which
an individual is unaware.
subconscious Another term describing the mental level at which influential, but normally inaccessible, mental
processes take place.
A fascinating demonstration of mental processing without awareness was provided by
an experiment with patients who had surgery under general anesthesia. After their
operations, but while the patients were still unconscious from the anesthesia, an audiotape of fifteen word pairs was played over and over for them in the recovery room.
After regaining consciousness, the patients could not say what words were on the tape
or even whether a tape had been played at all. However, when given one word from
each of the word pairs and asked to say the first word that came to mind, the patients
were able to come up with the other member of the word pair from the tape (Cork,
Kihlstrom, & Hameroff, 1992).
Even when conscious and alert, you can sometimes process and use information
without being aware of it (Gaillard et al., 2006). In one study, participants watched a
computer screen as an X flashed in one of four locations. The task was to indicate where
the X appeared. The X’s location seemed to vary randomly but was actually determined
by a set of complex rules. (One such rule was “If the X moves horizontally twice in a
row, its next move will be vertical.”) Participants’ responses became progressively faster
and more accurate. Then, unknown to the participants, the rules were abandoned, and
the X appeared in truly random locations. Participants’ accuracy and speed deteriorated
instantly. Apparently, the participants had learned the rules without being aware of
them and had applied them to improve their performance. However, even when offered
$100 to state the rules that had guided the location sequence, they could not do so, nor
were they sure that any such rules existed (Lewicki, 1992).
Visual processing without awareness may even occur in certain cases of blindness.
When blindness is caused by damage only to the brain’s primary visual cortex, pathways from the eyes are still connected to other brain areas that process visual information. Some of these surviving connections may permit visual processing, but without