Ezequiel Morsella

The Unconscious Mind

The unconscious mind is still viewed by many psychological scientists as the shadow of a “real” conscious mind, though there now exists substantial evidence that the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than is its counterpart. This “conscious-centric” bias is due in part to the operational definition within cognitive psychology that equates unconscious with subliminal. We review the evidence challenging this restricted view of the unconscious emerging from contemporary social cognition research, which has traditionally defined the unconscious in terms of its unintentional nature; this research has demonstrated the existence of several independent unconscious behavioral guidance systems: perceptual, evaluative, and motivational. From this perspective, it is concluded that in both phylogeny and ontogeny, actions of an unconscious mind precede the arrival of a conscious mind—that action precedes reflection.

Evidence for a cascade model of lexical access in speech production.

How word production unfolds remains controversial. Serial models posit that phonological encoding begins only after lexical node selection, whereas cascade models hold that it can occur before selection. Both models were evaluated by testing whether unselected lexical nodes influence phonological encoding in the picture-picture interference paradigm. English speakers were shown pairs of superimposed pictures and were instructed to name one picture and ignore another. Naming was faster when target pictures were paired with phonologically related (bed-bell) than with unrelated (bed-pin) distractors. This suggests that the unspoken distractors exerted a phonological influence on production. This finding is inconsistent with serial models but in line with cascade ones. The facilitation effect was not replicated in Italian with the same pictures, supporting the view that the effect found in English was caused by the phonological properties of the stimuli.

The role of gestures in spatial working memory and speech.

Co-speech gestures traditionally have been considered communicative, but they may also serve other functions. For example, hand-arm movements seem to facilitate both spatial working memory and speech production. It has been proposed that gestures facilitate speech indirectly by sustaining spatial representations in working memory. Alternatively, gestures may affect speech production directly by activating embodied semantic representations involved in lexical search. Consistent with the first hypothesis, we found participants gestured more when describing visual objects from memory and when describing objects that were difficult to remember and encode verbally. However, they also gestured when describing a visually accessible object, and gesture restriction produced dysfluent speech even when spatial memory was untaxed, suggesting that gestures can directly affect both spatial memory and lexical retrieval.

Inferring speakers’ physical attributes from their voices

Abstract Two experiments examined listeners’ ability to make accurate inferences about speakers from the nonlinguistic content of their speech. In Experiment I, naive listeners heard male and female speakers articulating two test sentences, and tried to select which of a pair of photographs depicted the speaker. On average they selected the correct photo 76.5% of the time. All performed at a level that was reliably better than chance. In Experiment II, judges heard the test sentences and estimated the speakers’ age, height, and weight. A comparison group made the same estimates from photographs of the speakers. Although estimates made from photos are more accurate than those made from voice, for age and height the differences are quite small in magnitude—a little more than a year in age and less than a half inch in height. When judgments are pooled, estimates made from photos are not uniformly superior to those made from voices.

Subjective Aspects of Cognitive Control at Different Stages of Processing

Although research on cognitive control has addressed the effects that different forms of cognitive interference have on behavior and the activities of certain brain regions, until recently, the effects of interference on subjective experience have not been addressed. We demonstrate that, at the level of the individual trial, participants can reliably introspect the subjective aspects (e.g., perceptions of difficulty, competition, and control) of responding in interference paradigms. Similar subjective effects were obtained for both expressed and unexpressed (subvocalized) actions. Few participants discerned the source of these effects. These basic findings illuminate aspects of cognitive control and cognitive effort. In addition, these data have implications for the study of response interference in affect and self-control, and they begin to address theories regarding the function of consciousness.

Cognitive and neural components of the phenomenology of agency

A primary aspect of the self is the sense of agency – the sense that one is causing an action. In the spirit of recent reductionistic approaches to other complex, multifaceted phenomena (e.g., working memory; cf. Johnson & Johnson, 2009), we attempt to unravel the sense of agency by investigating its most basic components, without invoking high-level conceptual or ‘central executive’ processes. After considering the high-level components of agency, we examine the cognitive and neural underpinnings of its low-level components, which include basic consciousness and subjective urges (e.g., the urge to breathe when holding ones breath). Regarding urges, a quantitative review revealed that certain inter-representational dynamics (conflicts between action plans, as when holding ones breath) reliably engender fundamental aspects both of the phenomenology of agency and of ‘something countering the will of the self’. The neural correlates of such dynamics, for both primordial urges (e.g., air hunger) and urges elicited in laboratory interference tasks, are entertained. In addition, we discuss the implications of this unique perspective for the study of disorders involving agency.

What Is an Output

A recurrent idea in the history of psychology is that one is conscious of outputs but not of the complex processes underlying the generation of outputs, which is evident in the out-of-the-blue, “eureka-like” experiences associated with intuition. We examine how this idea may suffer from a logical fallacy and may thus have inadvertently hindered progress on the study of the intimate liaisons among high-level central processes, intuition, and overt action. It is proposed that, for various reasons, the only undisputable output in the nervous system is overt action. Once this is accepted, the overlooked relationship between conscious central processes and overt action can be examined. A review of the evidence reveals that conscious processing is in the business of, not low-level perceptual processing, motor control, or action production per se, but of constraining a peculiar form of knowledge-based, integrated action-goal selection, which can lead to integrated actions such as holding ones breath. Unconscious processing can influence behavior indirectly, by producing these conscious constraining dimensions that modulate action-goal selection, or directly, through unintegrated actions such as reflexively inhaling or responding to a subliminal stimulus. From this standpoint, eureka-like intuitions reflect not an atypical brain process but the general nature by which unconscious machinations influence action either directly or indirectly, through the limited purview of consciousness.

The olfactory system as the gateway to the neural correlates of consciousness

How consciousness is generated by the nervous system remains one of the greatest mysteries in science. Investigators from diverse fields have begun to unravel this puzzle by contrasting conscious and unconscious processes. In this way, it has been revealed that the two kinds of processes differ in terms of the underlying neural events and associated cognitive mechanisms. We propose that, for several reasons, the olfactory system provides a unique portal through which to examine this contrast. For this purpose, the olfactory system is beneficial in terms of its (a) neuroanatomical aspects, (b) phenomenological and cognitive/mechanistic properties, and (c) neurodynamic (e.g., brain oscillations) properties. In this review, we discuss how each of these properties and aspects of the olfactory system can illuminate the contrast between conscious and unconscious processing in the brain. We conclude by delineating the most fruitful avenues of research and by entertaining hypotheses that, in order for an olfactory content to be conscious, that content must participate in a network that is large-scale, both in terms of the neural systems involved and the scope of information integration.

External control of the stream of consciousness: Stimulus-based effects on involuntary thought sequences

The stream of consciousness often appears whimsical and free from external control. Recent advances, however, reveal that the stream is more susceptible to external influence than previously assumed. Thoughts can be triggered by external stimuli in a manner that is involuntary, systematic, and nontrivial. Based on these advances, our experimental manipulation systematically triggered a sequence of, not one, but two involuntary thoughts. Participants were instructed to (a) not subvocalize the name of visual objects and (b) not count the number of letters comprising object names. On a substantial proportion of trials, participants experienced both kinds of involuntary thoughts. Each thought arose from distinct, high-level processes (naming versus counting). This is the first demonstration of the induction of two involuntary thoughts into the stream of consciousness. Stimulus word length influenced dependent measures systematically. Our findings are relevant to many fields associated with the study of consciousness, including attention, imagery, and action control.

Traditional response interference effects from anticipated action outcomes: A response–effect compatibility paradigm

An act as simple as pressing a button involves various stages of processing. Each stage of action production is susceptible to interference from competing representations/processes. For example, in the Simon Effect, interference arises from an incongruence between incidental spatial information and the spatial properties of intended action; in the flanker task, interference arises when visual targets and distracters are associated with different responses (response interference [RI]). Less interference arises in the flanker task when targets and distracters are different in appearance but associated with the same response (perceptual interference [PI]). Interference also stems from the automatic activation of representations associated with the anticipated effects of an action, response-effect (R-E) compatibility (e.g., the presence of a left-pointing arrow after one presses a button on the right will increase interference in future trials). This has been explained by ideomotor theory-that the mental representation of anticipated action-effects are activated automatically by voluntary action and that such representations can cause facilitation or interference by automatically priming their associated action plans. To illuminate the nature of action production and provide additional support for ideomotor theory, we examined for the first time the effects of PI and RI in a new R-E compatibility paradigm.