More than 20 years ago Habib Davanloo coined the term unlocking of the unconscious to describe how the psychodynamic concept of the human unconscious can become accessible using the technique of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP). According to Davanloo, the possibility that unconscious material will be revealed is greatly increased when therapeutic efforts promote dominance of t...

An important approach to understand how the brain gives rise to consciousness is to probe the depth of unconscious processing, thus to define the key features that cause conscious awareness. Here, we investigate the possibility for subliminal stimuli to shape the context for unconscious processing. Context effects have generally been assumed to require consciousness. In the present experiment, ...

Recent findings of dissociations between direct and indirect tests of memory and perception have renewed enthusiasm for the study of unconscious processing. The authors argue that such findings are heir to the same problems of interpretation as are earlier evidence of unconscious influences--namely, one cannot eliminate the possibility that conscious processes contaminated the measure of uncons...

In this commentary, we focus on the role of attentional mechanisms in unconscious thought. We argue that even distracted or unconscious thought is capacity limited and differences in scope of attention influence processing during unconscious thought. Attention also would influence processes at different stages in the proposed lens model. We conclude that there is a clear need to understand the ...

In response to Greenwald's article on contemporary research on unconscious mental processes, the authors address three issues: (a) the independence of much recent research and theory from psychodynamic formulations; (b) the broad sweep of the psychological unconscious, including implicit perception, memory, thought, learning, and emotion; and (c) the possibility that the analytic power of uncon...

Perception and performance is affected not just by what we see but also by what we do not see-inputs that escape our awareness. While conscious processing and unconscious processing have been assumed to be separate and independent, here we report the propagation of unconscious exogenous cueing as determined by conscious motion perception. In a paradigm combining masked exogenous cueing and appa...

Unconscious (the, philosophy of): Ger. Philosophie des Unbewussten. The metaphysical system of E. v. Hartmann, by whom the absolute principle is called “the Unconscious.” “According to v. Hartmann (Philos. d. Unbewussten, 3) the unconscious is the absolute principle, active in all things, the force which is operative in the inorganic, organic, and mental alike, yet not revealed in consciousness...

The controversial idea that information can be processed and evaluated unconsciously to change behavior has had a particularly impactful history. Here, we extend a simple model of conscious decision-making to explain both conscious and unconscious accumulation of decisional evidence. Using a novel dichoptic suppression paradigm to titrate conscious and unconscious evidence, we show that unconsc...

Today’s world of continuous change thrives on creative individuals. Anecdotal reports suggest that creative performance benefits from unconscious processes. Empirical research on the role of the unconscious in creativity, though, is inconsistent and thus far has focused mainly on one aspect of the creative process – idea generation. This is the first study to assess the role of the unconscious ...

To further our understanding of the function of conscious experience we need to know which cognitive processes require awareness and which do not. Here, we show that an unconscious stimulus can trigger inhibitory control processes, commonly ascribed to conscious control mechanisms. We combined the metacontrast masking paradigm and the Go/No-Go paradigm to study whether unconscious No-Go signals...