The proposed research has three primary goals: (1) to investigate the relationship between objective measures of cognitive control, and self-report measures of awareness, (2) to contrast different assumptions concerning the relationship between automatic and controlled influences of perception and of memory, and (3) to explore a variety of manipulations that may selectively affect the two types of influence. Research aimed at examining the relation between automatic and controlled processes has the additional goal of further examining the assumptions that underlie the process-dissociation procedure, a procedure developed to separate the contributions of automatic and controlled influences to overall task performance. What is the relation between subjective experience and effects of perception and memory on task performance? Results of recent research provide striking examples of perceptual analysis in the absence of `seeing` and effects of the past in the absence of `remembering.` For example, amnesics show effects of practicing a task in their later performance even though they are unable to remember having practiced. Similar dissociations are shown by people with normally functioning memory. The proposed research extends previous work done to develop a process-dissociation procedure that allows one to separate the contributions of controlled (conscious) and automatic (unconscious) components to performance of a task. Among the topics investigated are unconscious perception and unconscious influences of memory.
