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Ap Dijksterhuis - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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first neural evidence for the Unconscious thought process
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2013Co-Authors: Ap DijksterhuisAbstract:Hemingway (1964/2010) describes a process that people who engage in creative pursuits from time to time recognize. While you are engaged in one thing—say a conversation with friends—consciously, something that you had been working on beforehand is still simmering Unconsciously. At times the simmering is quite vigorous, and the repeating conscious intrusions can make it difficult to fully concentrate on your current activity—talking to your friends. The idea of that incubation or Unconscious thought can aid creativity or problem solving is old (Schopenhauer, 1851), and 10 years ago, we started to link the process of unconsious thought to decision making in a series of experiments (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 2006; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006). The idea was based on two considerations. The first was that it is quite a small step from problem solving to decision making and the second was that the process of Unconscious thought as described in the first paragraph can often be sensed, introspectively, when one is in the process of making an important decision such as buying a house or choosing between one’s job and a job offer for a new one. In our initial experiments, we gave participants the task to choose between four alternatives (houses, cars, roommates, etc.) on the basis of a number of aspects (often 12 per alternative). Participants either decided immediately after reading the decision information, or after a period of conscious thought, or after a period of distraction during which Unconscious thought was assumed to take place. In our early experiments, Unconscious thinkers made better decisions than participants in the other two conditions. We initially called this the deliberation without attention effect; however, now we prefer the term Unconscious thought effect (UTE). These initial findings led a number of colleagues to also investigate the relation between Unconscious thought and decision making and, looking back now at 10 years of Unconscious thought research, the research seems to have revolved around two questions. The first is whether Unconscious thought indeed leads to better decisions that conscious thought or no thought, the second is whether Unconscious thought really exists in the first place (and if so, what exactly is it)? The contribution by Creswell et al. (2013) constitutes a major step towards answering the second question, so I focus briefly on the first before devoting the remainder of this introduction to the second and to the work by Creswell et al. Does Unconscious thought lead to better decisions? As such things tend to go, 10 years of research has led to a rather predictable answer: Probably, but only under some circumstances. The paradigm we developed turned out to be much more fragile than we had hoped, and although the UTE has been replicated independently in well over dozen laboratories, at least equally often people did not obtain any evidence for improved decision making after Unconscious thought. Some individual papers, as well as a recent meta-analysis (Strick et al., 2011), identified a number of moderators. It seems that unconsious thought is beneficial when decisions are based on a lot rather than on little information, when the decision information is presented blocked by decision alternative rather than completely randomized, when the distraction task is not too cognitively taxing, and when the decision information contains visual stimuli in addition to verbal stimuli. It is encouranging for proponents of the work on Unconscious thought that Unconscious thoughts seem to be more fruitful when the experimental set-up becomes more ecologically valid. That being said, some people have argued that Unconscious thought does not really exist in the first place. People may make better decisions after being distracted, but that does not yet mean that any decision related mental activity took place while they were distracted. Some have proposed, for instance, that participants in Unconscious thought conditions form an impression of the decision alternatives online—that is, while they read the decision information—and later simply retrieve this information. These participants may perform better than conscious thinkers, because under some circumstances, conscious thought can actually hamper decision making. Although it is indeed very likely that a reasonable proportion of participants in some Unconscious thought experiments indeed merely retrieved online impression (which, by the way, can be prevented by presenting the stimulus materials rapidly), this cannot explain why Unconscious thinkers also often outperform immediate decision makers (Strick et al., 2010), something that has been curiously overlooked when this alternative explanation was first published. However, there is also evidence that people who are not given the goal to make a decision before they are distracted make worse decisions than people who do have the goal (Bos et al., 2008), and this rules out this alternative explanation even more effectively. Unconscious thought is a goal-directed Unconscious process, and merely distracting people does not do anything. The experiment by Creswell et al.—in which they provide the first neural evidence for the UTE—also provides strong evidence for the Unconscious thought process. They indeed found that Unconscious thinkers made better decisions than conscious thinkers and than immediate decision makers. More importantly, they compared neural activity among people who were thinking Unconsciously while they were engaged in a distraction task with the neural activity of people doing this same distraction task without engaging in Unconscious thought. They found evidence for reactivation. The same regions that were active while people encoded the decision information—the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left intermediate visual cortex—were active during Unconscious thought. Moreover, the degree of neural reactivation differed between participants and was predictive of the quality of the decision after Unconscious thought. This is a breakthrough in Unconscious thought research, and, quite appropriately in a celebratory sort of way, published almost exactly 10 years after the first experiments with the Unconscious thought paradigm. Again, Creswell et al. provide the first neural evidence, and thereby—in my view at least—unambiguous evidence for the Unconscious thought process. Finally, they also provide insight into the characteristics of the Unconscious thought process. Althought some aspects of the Unconscious thought process can be carefully deduced from moderators, direct process-oriented evidence is scarce. Unconscious thought leads the representations of the decision alternatives in memory to become better organized and more polarized (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Bos et al., 2011) and interestingly, a recent paper shows that Unconscious thinkers rely more on gist memory than on verbatim memory (Abadie et al., in press) thereby also integrating fuzzy-trace theory (e.g. Reyna and Brainerd, 1995) and Unconscious thought theory. The reactivation account by Creswell et al. is fully in line with these earier findings, as earlier work on reactivation has repeatedly found (for references see the article by Creswell et al.) that reactivation improves memory and learning processes. The work by Creswell and colleagues constitues a vital step forwards. The combined evidence now suggests that Unconscious thought is a goal-directed process of neural reactivation during which memory representations of—in this case decision alternatives—change.
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Food for Thought? Trust Your Unconscious When Energy Is Low
Journal of Neuroscience Psychology and Economics, 2012Co-Authors: Ap Dijksterhuis, Rick B Van BaarenAbstract:Recent studies showed that a period of Unconscious thought can help when making complex decisions. Under some circumstances, Unconscious thought improves decisions even more than conscious thought. Executive functioning depends on energy provided by glucose, and we know from previous research that the performance of various conscious processes deteriorates when energy is low. Unconscious processes require less energy and may operate unhampered when energy is low. Therefore, we propose that whereas low blood glucose levels impair conscious thought, this is not the same for Unconscious thought. An experiment, where we manipulated blood glucose levels, indicated that indeed, when making decisions, the Unconscious can best be trusted when blood glucose levels are low, whereas conscious deliberation yields the best results when blood glucose levels are elevated.
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creativity the role of Unconscious processes in idea generation and idea selection
Thinking Skills and Creativity, 2012Co-Authors: Simone M Ritter, Rick B Van Baaren, Ap DijksterhuisAbstract: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 mind for both idea generation and idea selection. Participants generated creative ideas immediately, after conscious thought, or after a period of distraction during which Unconscious thought was hypothesized to take place. After having listed their ideas, participants selected their most creative idea. Performance in idea generation was similar between conscious and Unconscious thought; however, individuals who had Unconsciously thought about ideas were better in selecting their most creative idea. These findings shed more light on the role of Unconscious processes in creativity, and provide a means to enhance creative performance.
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the merits of Unconscious thought in creativity
Psychological Science, 2008Co-Authors: Chenbo Zhong, Ap Dijksterhuis, Adam D GalinskyAbstract:Research has yielded weak empirical support for the idea that creative solutions may be discovered through Unconscious thought, despite anecdotes to this effect. To understand this gap, we examined the effect of Unconscious thought on two outcomes of a remote-association test (RAT): implicit accessibility and conscious reporting of answers. In Experiment 1, which used very difficult RAT items, a short period of Unconscious thought (i.e., participants were distracted while holding the goal of solving the RAT items) increased the accessibility of RAT answers, but did not increase the number of correct answers compared with an equal duration of conscious thought or mere distraction. In Experiment 2, which used moderately difficult RAT items, Unconscious thought led to a similar level of accessibility, but fewer correct answers, compared with conscious thought. These findings confirm and extend Unconscious-thought theory by demonstrating that processes that increase the mental activation of correct solutions ...
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a theory of Unconscious thought
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2006Co-Authors: Ap Dijksterhuis, Loran F NordgrenAbstract:We present a theory about human thought named the Unconscious-thought theory (UTT). The theory is applicable to decision making, impression formation, attitude formation and change, problem solving, and creativity. It distinguishes between two modes of thought: Unconscious and conscious. Unconscious thought and conscious thought have different characteristics, and these different characteristics make each mode preferable under different circumstances. For instance, contrary to popular belief, decisions about simple issues can be better tackled by conscious thought, whereas decisions about complex matters can be better approached with Unconscious thought. The relations between the theory and decision strategies, and between the theory and intuition, are discussed. We end by discussing caveats and future directions.
Roy P. C. Kessels - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Spared Unconscious influences of spatial memory in diencephalic amnesia
Experimental Brain Research, 2008Co-Authors: Albert Postma, Rémy Antonides, Arie J. Wester, Roy P. C. KesselsAbstract:Spatial memory is crucial to our daily lives and in part strongly depends on automatic, implicit memory processes. This study investigates the neurocognitive basis of conscious and Unconscious influences of object–location memory in amnesic patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome ( N = 23) and healthy controls ( N = 18) using a process-dissociation procedure in a computerized spatial memory task. As expected, the patients performed substantially worse on the conscious memory measures but showed even slightly stronger effects of Unconscious influences than the controls. Moreover, a delayed test administered after 1 week revealed a strong decline in conscious influences in the patients, while Unconscious influences were not affected. The presented results suggest that conscious and Unconscious influences of spatial memory can be clearly dissociated in Korsakoff’s syndrome.
Loran F Nordgren - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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a theory of Unconscious thought
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2006Co-Authors: Ap Dijksterhuis, Loran F NordgrenAbstract:We present a theory about human thought named the Unconscious-thought theory (UTT). The theory is applicable to decision making, impression formation, attitude formation and change, problem solving, and creativity. It distinguishes between two modes of thought: Unconscious and conscious. Unconscious thought and conscious thought have different characteristics, and these different characteristics make each mode preferable under different circumstances. For instance, contrary to popular belief, decisions about simple issues can be better tackled by conscious thought, whereas decisions about complex matters can be better approached with Unconscious thought. The relations between the theory and decision strategies, and between the theory and intuition, are discussed. We end by discussing caveats and future directions.
Ryan B Scott - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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measuring Unconscious knowledge distinguishing structural knowledge and judgment knowledge
Psychological Research-psychologische Forschung, 2005Co-Authors: Zoltan Dienes, Ryan B ScottAbstract:This paper investigates the dissociation between conscious and Unconscious knowledge in an implicit learning paradigm. Two experiments employing the artificial grammar learning task explored the acquisition of Unconscious and conscious knowledge of structure (structural knowledge). Structural knowledge was contrasted to knowledge of whether an item has that structure (judgment knowledge). For both structural and judgment knowledge, conscious awareness was assessed using subjective measures. It was found that Unconscious structural knowledge could lead to both conscious and Unconscious judgment knowledge. When structural knowledge was Unconscious, there was no tendency for judgment knowledge to become more conscious over time. Furthermore, conscious rather than Unconscious structural knowledge produced more consistent errors in judgments, was facilitated by instructions to search for rules, and after such instructions was harmed by a secondary task. The dissociations validate the use of these subjective measures of conscious awareness.
Jeffrey W Sherman - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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a process dissociation examination of the cognitive processes underlying Unconscious thought
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2013Co-Authors: Rodica Ioana Damian, Jeffrey W ShermanAbstract:HIGHLIGHTS ► Conscious and Unconscious thought invoke both intuitive and rule-based processing. ► Process dissociation can be used to independently measure the underlying processes. ► Conscious and Unconscious thought invoke the same degree of intuitive processing. ► Conscious thought invokes more rule-based processing than Unconscious thought. ► Tasks and manipulations are not process-pure.
