Nonconscious Social Information Processing presents a research program concerned with the processing of social information. It cannot be considered a typical social psychological research program, however, because it is not aimed at explaining any specific social psychological phenomena, nor are the cognitive processes studied specific to the processing of social information. The program explores complex or ""high level"" processing of information that is not mediated by conscious awareness, and social cognition seems to be an appropriate area in which to investigate this kind of processing. The research program began with observations which suggest that nonconscious acquisition and processing of information play a major role in human development and adjustment. The first two chapters discuss these observations and present preliminary theoretical assumptions. The subsequent chapters contain reports of 34 experiments on nonconscious information processing. The book is addressed not only to personality and social psychologists, but also to cognitive psychologists concerned with information processing in general. The former may find this research relevant because most of the experiments describe some mechanisms of acquisition and utilization of social information—problems they are working on themselves. The latter may want to ignore the specific stimulus material (i.e., social information) employed in most of the experiments and focus on the general nature of the cognitive mechanisms studied.

The aim of this Frontiers Research Topic is to review and further explore the topic of unconscious processing in executive control. Executive control refers to the ability of the human brain – mostly associated with prefrontal cortex activity - to regulate the processing involved in the execution of novel or complex goal-directed tasks. Previous studies or models of human cognition have assumed that executive control necessarily requires conscious processing of information. This perspective is in line with common sense and personal introspection, which suggest that our choices are intentional and based on conscious stimuli. Nevertheless, in the last few years several behavioural and cognitive neuroscience studies have put under scrutiny this assumption. Cumulating evidence is now showing that prefrontal executive control can involve or be triggered by unconscious processing of information, with consequent effects on observed behaviours. One of the main methods adopted to study such unconscious mechanisms is masked priming, consisting in presenting visually masked stimuli, which nonetheless are shown to affect goal-directed behaviour or influence constructs linked to executive control and prefrontal cortex activity (e.g., task-set representation, response inhibition, conflict monitoring, error detection, reward processing, emotion regulation and task switching). This area of research is relatively young, and - while scientific evidence is emerging - no general consensus has been reached yet on how to interpret these early findings: some researchers accept that executive control can involve unconscious processing, others momentarily put aside - in first approximation - this issue, others criticize this possibility on theoretical grounds (e.g., pointing to the need of better definitions of terms such as control, conflict and consciousness) or based on experimental findings. At this stage, it appears necessary that researchers in the field make a collective effort to deepen the understanding of the unconscious mechanisms involved in executive control. This Research Topic will focus on neuroscience, but it will welcome contributions on purely behavioural and psychophysiological studies, patient reports, computational investigations, as well as philosophical and historical analyses of the relationship between executive control and consciousness. In particular, we encourage experts in this field to submit contributions in the form of: a) reviews, opinions and discussions on existing literature concerning unconscious processing of information in executive control; b) original research articles (both behavioural-only and neuroimaging studies) on unconscious processing of information in executive control; c) discussions and opinions on new methodologies to investigate this issue (e.g., other than masked priming, which has been the technique of choice in most of the existing studies).

There are many ways to approach the understanding of consciousness. Questions about these ways have occupied philosophers and metaphysicians for centuries. During the early growth of cognitive science the problem of consciousness remained taboo, but an increasing number of studies have either implicitly or explicitly begun to bear on its nature. These have been inspired by a number of different different original questions, and focus on a variety of different empirical phenomena. Thus, studies of implicit memory, subliminal processing, strategic versus automatic processing, allocation of attention, and differences between information processes in the awake versus dreaming state all share a common assumption of a particular quality or state -- awakeness, awareness, alertness, namely consciousness -- that somehow can be distinguished from another type of state or states in which the subject is not aware of the information being processed. What distinguishes the cognitive psychological and cognitive neuroscience approach to the question of consciousness from that of philosophy and metaphysics is scientific methodology: a set of tools that permit the empirical study of a phenomenon in an objective and reproducible way. Recent developments in both the empirical and theoretical methodologies of these fields have made it possible to begin to study the phenomenon associated with -- if not directly underlying -- consciousness in a scientific fashion. This volume tries to resolve the difficulties associated with the scientific investigation of consciousness. The intent is to explore the extent to which consciousness can be the target of direct scientific inquiry, to get on the table some of the relevant work, and consider the degree to which this research can help inform our understanding of consciousness. It brings together a group of cognitive and neuroscientists to share relevant recent research in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience and to determine whether any new strategies for the scientific pursuit of this question can be developed. A long-term goal is the development of a unified understanding of consciousness, scientific as well as philosophical perspectives. This volume takes the first step toward building the necessary local bridges.

This volume contains the papers presented at the eighteenth Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, held October 27-29, 1983, at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. As has been the tradition for this annual series, the faculty of the Institute of Child Development invited internationally eminent researchers to present their research and to consider problems of mutual concern to scientists studying development. The theme of the eighteenth symposium, and the present volume was cognitive perspectives on social and behavior development.

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This collection of 20 original chapters by leading researchers examines the cognitive unconscious from social, cognitive, and neuroscientific viewpoints, presenting some of the most important developments at the heart of the new picture of the unconscious.

First published in 1991. The impetus for this book and the conference upon which it was based stemmed from the authors’ observation that the interrelated phenomena of attention and information processing were the focus of intensive theoretical analysis and empirical research in many different scientific disciplines. The goal of the conference upon which this volume is based was to bring together a distinguished group of investigators from different fields who had rarely (or never) interacted. The specific issues addressed in the present volume concern the changes that occur in attention and information processing during development, the role of selective attention and pre-attentive mechanisms in information processing, the allocation of processing resources, the physiological correlates of attention, and the role of attention-like processes in learning and memory in animals. The participants were from all over the world and represented the areas of psychophysiology, human infancy, developmental psychobiology, animal learning, autonomic regulation, and psychopathology.