Consciousness, emotion and cognition - how the mind works: an  (Page 2/4)

So basically people use preconceived notions of the world (termed 'schema') to help themselves think. It makes sense that it is easier to think if you have the experience or thought (or some of the experience or thought) already thought out.

Implicit processesing and attention

• We propose implicit processes are processes that possess features of automaticity. Because different automaticity features do not necessarily co-occur, werecommend specifying the automaticity features one has in mind when using the term implicit.
• The starting point of our analysis is the postulate that the meaning of the term implicit is identical to the meaning of the term automatic.
• For instance, all automatic processes are assumed to be unintentional, uncontrolled, unconscious, efficient, and fastwhereas all non-automatic processes are assumed to be intentional, controlled, conscious, inefficient, and slow. According to this view, it is relatively easy to diagnose a process asautomatic. It suffices to demonstrate that the process possesses one of the automaticity features. If it has one of the features, it can be assumed to have all other automaticity featureand thus to be fully automatic.
• It became clear, however, that the different automaticity features do not always cooccur. Evidence from Stroop studies, for instance, suggests that the processing of wordmeaning is automatic in that it does not depend on the intention to process the meaning of the word. At the same time, word processing is non-automatic in that it depends on the allocationof attention to the word

Rainer Banse and Roland Imhoff outline some social cognitive dual process theories:

• Unlike the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious as a powerful monitoring system that strategically decides whether pieces of information are allowed to become conscious ornot, contemporary social cognition theories rather assume that implicit content can operate outside of awareness because it is automatically activated. Contemporary dual-processtheories postulate two distinct information processing systems. For example, the Reflective- Impulsive Model of social behavior by Strack and Deutsch (2004) distinguishes a reflectiveand an impulsive system of information processing. The reflective system is based on propositional knowledge representations (i.e., information in the form of declarative sentencesthat are either true or false) and can perform complex, logical operations. This system is flexible and powerful, but it requires cognitive resources and allocation of attention. Theimpulsive system is based on an associative network and operates by the principle of spreading activation. Unlike the reflective system the impulsive system operates in anautomatic fashion and does not require cognitive resources or the allocation of attention.However, the fact that automatic or implicit processes do not require attention does not imply that the content or outcome of implicit processes are ipso facto unconscious.