of the original article: Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different “consciousnesses.” Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often part...

Searle’s Connection Principle says that “the ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness”. In this paper I want to defend the thesis that Searle’s theory of mind, and especially the Connection Principle, does not offer a coherent picture of unconscious mental states and, a fortiori, of the intentional li...

The papers collected in this special issue of Psychological Research are based on contributions to a symposium on ‘‘Implicit Learning, Intention, and Consciousness’’ that was held at the 13th Conference of the European Society of Cognitive Psychology in Granada, Spain, 17–20 September 2003. The goal of the symposium, as well as of the current special issue, was to discuss different perspectives...

Relational inference denotes the capacity to encode, flexibly retrieve, and integrate multiple memories to combine past experiences to update knowledge and improve decision-making in new situations. Although relational inference is thought to depend on the hippocampus and consciousness, we now show in young, healthy men that it may occur outside consciousness but still recruits the hippocampus....

Since the time of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), people have been fascinated by the possibility of a powerful and influential ‘unconscious’ that controls much of our behaviour. Though Freud conceives of this unconscious largely in terms of emotional urges and powers to suppress these urges, a more cognitive interpretation in terms of mental processes is highly feasible [1, 2]. Most of us will proba...

In the language used by those who take an empirical approach to study of consciousness, subliminal–supraliminal binary and unconscious–conscious process are treated as one same, despite distinction having a historical association different meaning. The meaning may then become implicitly associated with interpretations related studies, resulting in misinterpretation evidence. This is say, where ...