The same action can be conscious or unconscious, a wink versus a blink for instance. Thank Freud for the original distinction, which has since become pervasive in science and in everyday life. Yet at present the distinction lacks any scientific basis other than intuition. No evidence, so far, has stood the test of time to distinguish conscious behavior from unconscious automatic behavior. Nonetheless the distinction remains widely accepted.
The scientific definition hangs mostly on knowing what automatic behavior is. We define consciously controlled behavior by first defining automatic and unconscious behavior. Conscious behavior is then what automatic behavior is not. In that light, scientists equate automatic behavior with a kind of mindlessness, an absence of attentive, voluntary effort. In this view, automatic behaviors are triggered by environmental events, in the way a sudden burst of air can make you blink. But careful experiments have discovered attention and volition play a role in many supposedly automatic behaviors, leading to a reformulation of the definition of automatic behavior. Behavior can be considered as more-or-less automatic as learned constraints gradually accrue to coordinate perception, action and cognition. The present work will test a new and promising metric of automaticity, based in fractal geometry, to gauge the degree of automaticity in human behavior.
The test domain is skilled and novice reading by college students, nonnative readers, and children as they learn to read. Acquisition of reading skill has been seen traditionally as a transition from controlled word decoding to automatic word recognition. Thus a change in how we understand automaticity inevitably changes how we understand skilled reading and reading acquisition, and speaks directly to practical reading instruction.
