![]() ![]() Yet with rather few exceptions (e.g., Dienes, 2015 Greenwald et al., 1995 Sand & Nilsson, 2016 Stephens et al., 2019), very little attention has been devoted to evaluating the adequacy of different methods for inferring unconscious mental processes from bivariate data or to examining the assumptions on which they rest. After all, inferring unobservable mental processes from patterns of observable behavior is one of the most fundamental and challenging problems facing psychological science ( Kellen et al., 2021). Given how common the practice is of collecting bivariate performance/awareness data, one might imagine that there has been rich discussion about the general strategies available to researchers for analyzing and interpreting such data. Although there are other general approaches for studying unconscious processes – for example, research on the Unconscious Thought Effect and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) takes different approaches (see Abadie and Waroquier, 2019, and Greenwald and Banaji, 2017) – many hundreds of studies conducted over the past several decades can be conceptualized within this framework of bivariate measurement. For instance, speed of responding to briefly presented angry or neutral faces might be measured together with perceptual awareness (e.g., discrimination) of facial expression ( Hedger et al., 2016), or learning of an advantageous decision strategy might be related to verbal reports of the strategy ( Bechara et al., 1997). When researchers explore unconscious influences in learning, memory, action, perception, decision making, cognitive control, emotion, and other domains, they commonly employ experimental tasks in which two measurements are taken: One is the primary performance index and the other is a measurement of the participant's awareness of whatever critical stimulus feature or relationship is assumed to drive performance in the primary task. Similarly, we appear to be able to acquire complex skills such as language with little awareness of the underlying rules ( Chomsky, 1980). For example, our perceptual experience is strikingly impoverished ( Cohen et al., 2021), raising the question of how much impact events have on us when they are not consciously perceived. Reasons for this interest are not hard to find. Research on the nature and scope of unconscious or implicit mental processes has long been a core concern of cognitive psychologists, and interest in the topic shows no signs of abating (e.g., Blake, 2021 LeDoux et al., 2020).
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