UC Berkeley

The cognitive revolution in psychology brought with it renewed interest in consciousness and unconscious mental life. Automatic processes are unconscious in the sense that they are inaccessible to phenomenal awareness and independent of voluntary control. Studies employing “priming” paradigms reveal dissociations between explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) perception, memory, learning, and thinking. Beyond unconscious cognition, there is evidence of automatic and unconscious emotional and motivational states.