Part III. Strengthening the umbilical cord

Abstract

The distinction between awareness and non-awareness of an action or its consequences is of great importance in law and ethics. A killer, for example, will be found not guilty if it can be ascertained that he/she was unable to foresee the consequences of the act. Such a verdict rests on the view that awareness is a dichotomous concept: either there is total awareness of an event (external or internal) or total unawareness. Countless occasions in everyday experience negate such a view of a dichotomy. Ordinarily we walk without being aware of the specific action involved in walking; when, however, the road is slippery we become acutely aware of the movements of our legs. Likewise, while driving a car an experienced driver may become absorbed in a conversation, completely unaware of his driving; if an unusual problem occurs on the road he or she will focus on the very act of driving. But had we been totally unaware of walking or driving we would not have known when to pay more attention to the road. Awareness, then, seems to be best conceptualized as a continuum with many points between its two poles. Degree of awareness is a legitimate variable in psychology (although it is not without problems of definition and measurement) but it is doubtful whether such a dimension is of pivotal importance in classifying information processing. Hebb (1980) described an experiment conducted by the German psychologist Ktilpe in which subjects were requested to explain how they perform simple arithmetic operations (an unquestionably cognitive activity). They were unable to do so. Hebb noticed that “there are things going on in one’s mind that are not introspectable at all”. Similarly Nisbett and Wilson (1977) made a strong argument that attribution can be erroneous, because its underlying processes are not detectable by introspection. But they did not make the claim that these processes are noncognitz’ve. This very point was stressed by Mandler (1975) who posited that “there are many systems that cannot be brought into consciousness, and probably most systems that analyse the environment in the first place have that characteristic. In most of these cases only the products of cognitive and mental activities are available to consciousness” (p. 245). Referring to attribution processes, which are considered to be in the realm of cognitive activity, Taylor and Fiske (1978) conclude that these processes “seem to occur automatically and substantially without awareness....” As Foa and Foa (1974) noted, there is no doubt that some cognitive activities such as relating one event to another, are often in the realm of awareness. However, cognitive activities such as classifying a stimulus according to its attributes are more likely to be unconscious. Wickens (1970) reported results which suggest that the process of perceiving a word involves multiple classitication, since the word is placed along a number of cognitive dimensions. In proposing that this process is unconscious he comments: “I do not think that the identity of the many encoding attributes or dimensions enter very much into the individual’s consciousness. Consequently, we are unaware intellectually of the richness of the encoding of a single word. If we were to consciously recognise this richness, then so much time would be required for the perceptual ingestion of a single word that we would lit-id it next to impossible to listen to a series of words and remember any but the first and last of them” (p. 3) Wickens proceeded to suggest that intellectual and conceptual meaningful reactions to common words are handled automatically. Perhaps the best refutation to date of an awareness-unawareness dichotomy is the finding that memory depends on mood states. Events associated with a certain emotion are best recalled when the subject is again in that same mood. The same emotion then may elicit high awareness of certain events and little or no awareness of others (Bower, 1981).