Unconscious Control Research Articles

Differential unconscious control of the medial prefrontal cortex during non-REM and REM sleep to mitigate anterograde and retrograde interferences in visual perceptual learning

Differential unconscious control of the medial prefrontal cortex during non-REM and REM sleep to mitigate anterograde and retrograde interferences in visual perceptual learning

The early encounter: shallow looking and the manifest presence in medical education

If the pressure of patient flow limits a doctor’s visit to fifteen minutes, the importance of the early encounter is increasing. My proposal is dedicated to the first moment of the intersubjective encounter (with art or otherwise), that defined by the unconscious assessment a priori to conscious interpretation, its authority in the clinical encounter, and how to address this moment in medical education.The dynamics between observer and artwork occur in two stages. First, the observer’s senses are attacked, indeed overwhelmed, by the work. Our adaptive unconscious uses reflexive techniques (e.g. thin-slicing) to triage and resolve this information to a more manageable load. Because pattern collection, discovery, and comparison are under unconscious control, the question arises concerning accountability for snap judgments. By studying the patterns that thin-slicing utilizes and our immediate reaction given these patterns, the conscious self can predict—or at least become more accountable—for these judgments.Second, uncomfortable as the victim of a sensory attack, the observer dominates the artwork through the act of interpretation. The observer’s intellect and desire to interpret (both under conscious control) dissolve the uncertainty of the encounter by categorizing it into a comfortable system. Once attuned to this conscious power reversal, we can restrain the unconscious desire prompting the reversal and maintain space in the intersubjective encounter.As visual art is a strong vehicle to discuss the theory behind the dynamics of the early encounter, it is also the appropriate method by which to coach medical students through the early medical encounter.

Alteration of Postural Reactions in Rats with Different Levels of Dopamine Depletion.

Dopamine (DA) is the critical neurotransmitter involved in the unconscious control of muscle tone and body posture. We evaluated the general motor capacities and muscle responses to postural disturbance in three conditions: normal DA level (wild-type rats, WT), mild DA deficiency (WT after administration of α-methyl-p-tyrosine-AMPT, that blocks DA synthesis), and severe DA depletion (DAT-KO rats after AMPT). The horizontal displacements in WT rats elicited a multi-component EMG corrective response in the flexor and extensor muscles. Similar to the gradual progression of DA-related diseases, we observed different degrees of bradykinesia, rigidity, and postural instability after AMPT. The mild DA deficiency impaired the initiation pattern of corrective responses, specifically delaying the extensor muscles' activity ipsilaterally to displacement direction and earlier extensor activity from the opposite side. DA depletion in DAT-KO rats after AMPT elicited tremors, general stiffness, and akinesia, and caused earlier response to horizontal displacements in the coactivated flexor and extensor muscles bilaterally. The data obtained show the specific role of DA in postural reactions and suggest that this experimental approach can be used to investigate sensorimotor control in different dopamine-deficient states and to model DA-related diseases.

Unconscious and Distinctive Control of Vocal Pitch and Timbre During Altered Auditory Feedback.

Vocal control plays a critical role in smooth social communication. Speakers constantly monitor auditory feedback (AF) and make adjustments when their voices deviate from their intentions. Previous studies have shown that when certain acoustic features of the AF are artificially altered, speakers compensate for this alteration in the opposite direction. However, little is known about how the vocal control system implements compensations for alterations of different acoustic features, and associates them with subjective consciousness. The present study investigated whether compensations for the fundamental frequency (F0), which corresponds to perceived pitch, and formants, which contribute to perceived timbre, can be performed unconsciously and independently. Forty native Japanese speakers received two types of altered AF during vowel production that involved shifts of either only the formant frequencies (formant modification; Fm) or both the pitch and formant frequencies (pitch + formant modification; PFm). For each type, three levels of shift (slight, medium, and severe) in both directions (increase or decrease) were used. After the experiment, participants were tested for whether they had perceived a change in the F0 and/or formants. The results showed that (i) only formants were compensated for in the Fm condition, while both the F0 and formants were compensated for in the PFm condition; (ii) the F0 compensation exhibited greater precision than the formant compensation in PFm; and (iii) compensation occurred even when participants misperceived or could not explicitly perceive the alteration in AF. These findings indicate that non-experts can compensate for both formant and F0 modifications in the AF during vocal production, even when the modifications are not explicitly or correctly perceived, which provides further evidence for a dissociation between conscious perception and action in vocal control. We propose that such unconscious control of voice production may enhance rapid adaptation to changing speech environments and facilitate mutual communication.

Overstepping the boundaries of free choice: Folk beliefs on free will and determinism in real world contexts.

We know little about the commonality of folk beliefs around applications of psychological research on the unconscious control of behaviours. To address this, in Experiment 1 (N=399) participants volunteered examples of where research on the unconscious has been applied to influence their behaviours. A subset of these were presented in Experiment 2 (N=198) and Experiment 3 (N=100). Participants rated the extent to which the behaviour being influenced in these contexts was: (1) via the unconscious, (2) free, (3) the result of prior conscious intentions, (4) under conscious control. Relative to judgements about the extent to which behaviour was influenced via the unconscious, the remaining judgements regarding conscious control of behaviours were either higher (e.g., political contexts) or lower (e.g., therapy). This study is the first to show, using ecologically valid examples, the folk beliefs people share on psychological constructs concerning free will and determinism.

Influence of Unconscious Emotional Control Goals Priming on Anticipatory Anxiety and Physiological Activity

Individuals frequently generate emotion during the anticipation process and the anticipatory emotion has an important adaptive significance, especially the negative anticipative emotion. Many researches used conscious emotion regulation strategy and successfully reduced negative anticipatory emotion. However, it is costly for our limited cognition. In the present study, we used sentence unscrambling tasks to prime unconscious emotion control goal and investigated its effect on anticipatory anxiety, including experience and physiological activity. The results showed that 1) relative to anticipating neutral images, participations’ anxiety experience and skin conductance level were higher when anticipating negative and unknown images; 2) participants who had a unconscious emotion control goal primed achieved the same decrease in skin conductance as those explicitly instructed to reappraise, compared to a control group; 3) heart rate was not affected by experiment condition and anticipation type. Together, these findings suggest that unconscious emotion regulation may provide an effective mean of regulating negative anticipatory emotion.

Commentary: Musical hallucinations: review of treatment effects.

Commentary: Musical hallucinations: review of treatment effects.

The divergent effects of fear and disgust on unconscious inhibitory control

Previous studies have shown that negative emotional distracters impair conscious inhibitory control. Recent research has shown that inhibitory control can be triggered unconsciously; therefore, in Experiment 1, we aimed to investigate whether negative emotional distracters affect unconscious inhibitory control. Furthermore, in Experiment 2, we examined whether fearful and disgusting distracters have differential effects on unconscious inhibitory control. Participants were instructed to perform a masked Go/No-Go task superimposed on a negative or neutral image cue (Experiment 1) or on a fearful, disgusting or neutral image cue (Experiment 2). Results showed that negative emotional distracters impaired unconscious inhibitory control; furthermore, disgusting distracters impeded unconscious inhibitory control when compared to fearful ones. This study is the first to provide evidence that fear and disgust may affect unconscious inhibitory control differently. These results expand the understanding of the relationship between emotions and inhibitory control.

Is conflict adaptation triggered by feature repetitions? An unexpected finding.

For decades, cognitive adaptation to response conflict has been considered to be the hallmark of cognitive control. Notwithstanding a vast amount of evidence ruling out low-level interpretations of these findings, disbelief still exists with regard to the underlying cause of the observed effects. Especially when considering cognitive adaptation to unconscious conflict, it is still a matter of debate whether repetitions of features between trials might explain this intriguing finding rather than the involvement of unconscious control. To this purpose, we conducted two masked priming experiments in which four different responses to four different stimuli were required. This allowed us to completely eliminate repetitions of prime and target over consecutive trials. Independent of whether conflicting information was presented clearly visible or almost imperceptible, the results showed an unexpected pattern. Contrary to the regular congruency sequence effect (CSE; i.e., classic Gratton effect), in both experiments the congruency effect increased following incongruent trials. Interestingly, this reversed effect completely disappeared when we eliminated all trials with feature repetitions from the analysis. A third experiment, in which feature repetitions were excluded a priori, showed a small but regular CSE in the error rates only. Given that feature repetitions are theoretically thought to create a regular CSE, our results are not in line with an interpretation in terms of feature repetitions nor with an interpretation in terms of cognitive control. We conclude that examining cognitive adaptation with or without feature repetitions might be more difficult to conceive than is often suggested in the literature.

Unconscious Presentation of Object Affordances Evokes a Negative Compatibility Effect

According to Gibson's (1979) theory of “affordances”, the environment is constantly bombarding the viewer with a multitude of possible actions. More recently, it has been suggested that the simple viewing of an object can automatically elicit motor plans for actions towards this object. Research has attributed this phenomenon to the existence of two different neural pathways for processing visual information from objects and implied a distinction between conscious visual perception (meditated by the ventral stream) and unconscious visuomotor control (sub-served by the dorsal stream). This has proved compelling to many researchers, who have further tried to dissociate conscious visual perception from visually guided performance. In the present study, participants formed precision and power grips in response to a central colour stimulus, in order to determine whether these actions could be modulated by the prior subliminal presentation of pinch/grasp affording prime objects. All prime objects were briefly presented for 20 ms, thus making it impossible for participants to consciously identify these. A mask followed the prime's initial onset, after which the target was presented. The time between the onset of the prime and the appearance of the target was, also, varied in order to assess the time course of any priming effects obtained. The results suggest that affordances for relevant actions can also be extracted from objects whose physical properties are far from obvious, and appear inaccessible to consciousness. Furthermore, we provide evidence of a negative compatibility effect under experimental circumstances that have not been described in the literature before, and which rule out many kinds of interaction at a perceptual level.

What explains consciousness? Or…What consciousness explains?

In this invited commentary I focus on the topic addressed in three papers: De Sousa's (2013[1617]) Toward an Integrative Theory of Consciousness, a monograph with Parts 1 & 2, as well as commentaries by Pereira (2013a[59]) and Hirstein (2013[42]). All three are impressively scholarly and can stand—and shout—on their own. But theory of consciousness? My aim is to slice that topic into the two fundamentally different kinds of theories of consciousness, say what appears to be an ideology, out of behaviourism into cognitivism, now also influencing the quest for an “explanation of consciousness” in cognitive neuroscience. I will then say what can be expected given what we know of the complexity of brain structure, the richness of a conscious “vocabulary”, and current technological limits of brain imaging. This will then turn to the strategy for examining “what consciousness explains”—metatheory, theories, mappings, and a methodology of competitive support, a methodology especially important where there are competing commitments. There are also increasingly common identifications of methodological bias in, along with failures to replicate, studies reporting unconscious controls in decision, social priming—as there have been in perception, learning, problem solving, etc. The literature critique has provided evidence taken as reducing, and in some cases eliminating, a role for conscious controls—a position consistent with that ideology out of behaviourism into cognitivism. It is an ideological position that fails to recognize the fundamental distinction between theoretical and metaphysical assertions.

Subliminal understanding of negation: Unconscious control by subliminal processing of word pairs

A series of five experiments investigated the extent of subliminal processing of negation. Participants were presented with a subliminal instruction to either pick or not pick an accompanying noun, followed by a choice of two nouns. By employing subjective measures to determine individual thresholds of subliminal priming, the results of these studies indicated that participants were able to identify the correct noun of the pair--even when the correct noun was specified by negation. Furthermore, using a grey-scale contrast method of masking, Experiment 5 confirmed that these priming effects were evidenced in the absence of partial awareness, and without the effect being attributed to the retrieval of stimulus-response links established during conscious rehearsal.

Complete unconscious control: Using (in)action primes to demonstrate completely unconscious activation of inhibitory control mechanisms

Although robust evidence indicates that action initiation can occur unconsciously and unintentionally, the literature on action inhibition suggests that inhibition requires both conscious thought and intentionality. In prior research demonstrating automatic inhibition in response to unconsciously processed stimuli, the unconscious stimuli had previously been consciously associated with an inhibitory response within the context of the experiment, and participants had consciously formed a goal to activate inhibition processes when presented with the stimuli (because task instructions required participants to engage in inhibition when the stimuli occurred). Therefore, prior work suggests that some amount of conscious thought and intentionality are required for inhibitory control. In the present research, we recorded event-related potentials during two go/no-go experiments in which participants were subliminally primed with general action/inaction concepts that had never been consciously associated with task-specific responses. We provide the first demonstration that inhibitory control processes can be modulated completely unconsciously and unintentionally.

Unconscious Control of Voluntary Task Choice Through Achievement-Goal VS. Fun-Goal Priming

자발적 과제전환 패러다임은 다양한 과제수행의 상황에서 참가자의 자유로운 과제선택행동을 분석하는데 유용한 방법이다. 본 연구에서는 자발적 과제전환 패러다임을 토대로 목표의 무의식적인 활성화가 한 개인이 일상적으로 추구하는 동기와의 상호작용속에서 과제들간의 전환손실과 과제선택행동에 어떤 영향을 주는지를 분석하고자 하였다. 이를 위해 실험에서는 참가자에게 그림과제를 통해 성취목표 또는 흥미목표를 점화한 후, 난이도가 다른 과제를 자발적으로 선택하며 수행하도록 했다. 그 결과, 성취목표점화조건에서 흥미목표점화조건보다 오답율의 전환손실이 더 적게 나타났으며, 일상적으로 성취목표를 추구하는 경향이 높은 참가자들에게 성취목표가 점화되었을 때, 쉬운 과제로의 편향이 나타났다. 이 결과는 과제전환의 상황에서 외부환경의 목표점화를 통해 의식적인 과제선택행동에 무의식적으로 영향을 줄 수 있는 가능성과 과제전환손실과 과제선택행동의 개인차변인으로서 목표 및 동기의 중요성을 시사하고 있다. 논의에서는 과제선택행동과 인지적 조절과정에 무의식적으로 영향을 줄 수 있는 변인들에 대한 후속연구의 방향을 다루었다.

Brain mechanisms underlying automatic and unconscious control of motor action

Are we in command of our motor acts?The popular belief holds that our conscious decisions are the direct causes of our actions. However, overwhelming evidence from neurosciences demonstrates that our actions are instead largely driven by brain processes that unfold outside of our consciousness. To study these brain processes, scientists have used a range of different functional brain imaging techniques and experimental protocols, such as subliminal priming. Here, we review recent advances in the field and propose a theoretical model of motor control that may contribute to a better understanding of the pathophysiology of movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease.

Controlling the unconscious and unconscious control

Event Abstract Back to Event Controlling the unconscious and unconscious control Petroc Sumner1 1 Cardiff University, United Kingdom Sensory input can unconsciously trigger motor plans. Does this represent a parallel pathway to action that competes with, and must be controlled by, voluntary processes, or is it an intrinsic part of volitional mechanisms? We have probed this question using masked priming, which can evoke both subliminal facilitation and subliminal inhibition of responses. A series of behavioral experiments revealed that attention can act on sensorimotor processes that are independent of the representations that support awareness. We could further show that subliminal inhibition does not interact with control adaptation. Thus some level of control is itself exerted unconsciously. To probe the underlying functional anatomy of unconscious control, we had the opportunity to study two extremely rare patients with microlesions of the SEF and SMA, and could demonstrate that these areas are involved in involuntary motor control, in addition to their well-known role in voluntary control. Involuntary control therefore appears to share neural machinery with voluntary behavior, indicating that our brains do not recognize any clear distinction between automatic and controlled behavior. Keywords: Attention, Sef, SMA Conference: XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011. Presentation Type: Symposium: Oral Presentation Topic: Symposium 4: Attention, awareness and control Citation: Sumner P (2011). Controlling the unconscious and unconscious control. Conference Abstract: XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI). doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00029 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 09 Nov 2011; Published Online: 15 Nov 2011. Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Petroc Sumner Google Petroc Sumner Google Scholar Petroc Sumner PubMed Petroc Sumner Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Dissociable Brain Mechanisms Underlying the Conscious and Unconscious Control of Behavior

Cognitive control allows humans to overrule and inhibit habitual responses to optimize performance in challenging situations. Contradicting traditional views, recent studies suggest that cognitive control processes can be initiated unconsciously. To further capture the relation between consciousness and cognitive control, we studied the dynamics of inhibitory control processes when triggered consciously versus unconsciously in a modified version of the stop task. Attempts to inhibit an imminent response were often successful after unmasked (visible) stop signals. Masked (invisible) stop signals rarely succeeded in instigating overt inhibition but did trigger slowing down of response times. Masked stop signals elicited a sequence of distinct ERP components that were also observed on unmasked stop signals. The N2 component correlated with the efficiency of inhibitory control when elicited by unmasked stop signals and with the magnitude of slowdown when elicited by masked stop signals. Thus, the N2 likely reflects the initiation of inhibitory control, irrespective of conscious awareness. The P3 component was much reduced in amplitude and duration on masked versus unmasked stop trials. These patterns of differences and similarities between conscious and unconscious cognitive control processes are discussed in a framework that differentiates between feedforward and feedback connections in yielding conscious experience.

Stress-related psycho-physiological disorders: randomized single blind placebo controlled naturalistic study of psychometric evaluation using a radio electric asymmetric treatment

BackgroundThe aim of this study is to investigate the effects of a radio electric asymmetric treatment on psycho-physiological disorders (PPD). PPD are often stress related and are under the unconscious control of the patient and cannot be traced back to any serious physical disease. The brain stimulation treatment protocol used is called Neuro Psycho Physical Optimization (NPPO) with a Radio Electric Asymmetric Conveyer (REAC) device.MethodsPsychological stress and PPD were measured for a group of 888 subjects using the Psychological Stress Measure (PSM) test, a self-administered questionnaire. Data were collected immediately before and after the 4-weeks of REAC treatment cycle.ResultsThis study showed a significant reduction in scores measuring subjective perceptions of stress for subjects treated with a cycle of NPPO REAC treatment. At the end-point the number of subjects reporting symptoms of stress-related PPD on the PSM test was significantly reduced, whereas in the placebo group the difference was not significant.ConclusionA cycle of NPPO treatment with REAC was shown to reduce subjective perceptions of stress measured by the PSM test and in particular on PPD.Trial RegistrationThis trial has been registered in the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR) with the number: ACTRN12607000463471.

Contextual control over task-set retrieval

Contextual cues signaling task likelihood or the likelihood of task repetition are known to modulate the size of switch costs. We follow up on the finding by Leboe, Wong, Crump, and Stobbe (2008) that location cues predictive of the proportion of switch or repeat trials modulate switch costs. Their design employed one cue per task, whereas our experiment employed two cues per task, which allowed separate assessment of modulations to the cue-repetition benefit, a measure of lower level cue-encoding processes, and to the task-alternation cost, a measure of higher level processes representing task-set information. We demonstrate that location information predictive of switch proportion modulates performance at the level of task-set representations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that contextual control occurs even when subjects are unaware of the associations between context and switch likelihood. We discuss the notion that contextual information provides rapid, unconscious control over the extent to which prior task-set representations are retrieved in the service of guiding online performance.

Contextual control over task-set retrieval

Contextual cues signaling task likelihood or the likelihood of task repetition are known to modulate the size of switch costs. We follow up on the finding by Leboe, Wong, Crump, and Stobbe (2008) that location cues predictive of the proportion of switch or repeat trials modulate switch costs. Their design employed one cue per task, whereas our experiment employed two cues per task, which allowed separate assessment of modulations to the cue-repetition benefit, a measure of lower level cue-encoding processes, and to the task-alternation cost, a measure of higher level processes representing task-set information. We demonstrate that location information predictive of switch proportion modulates performance at the level of task-set representations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that contextual control occurs even when subjects are unaware of the associations between context and switch likelihood. We discuss the notion that contextual information provides rapid, unconscious control over the extent to which prior task-set representations are retrieved in the service of guiding online performance. M. J. C. Crump, matt.crump@vanderbilt.edu