Dancing in the dark: no role for consciousness in action control

Abstract

This article captures role of action control, which emerges from the interplay between unconscious, automatic, and reward-oriented action tendencies generated by the Id and rational, socially mediated considerations provided by the ego. This basic logic still provides the blueprint for our current theorizing about action control. Indeed, numerous "dual-route" models in almost all psychological and cognitive research areas assume that human action emerges from the interplay between consciously inaccessible automatic action tendencies and consciously accessible top-down processes that enforce intentional action goals and social acceptability. Cognitive operations or processing results may correlate with the presence or absence of conscious representation for many reasons. Signal-detection theory states that reporting a particular state of affairs requires that evidence passes a particular threshold and that it can be distinguished from noise, which implies that low-energy, complex, and/or difficult to discriminate information is unlikely to be reportable. Hence, the true impact of consciousness on the control of our actions may be more indirect and more socially mediated than common sense has it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)