1. ISSUES WITH THE DEFINITION 1
OF „UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT‟
IN UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT
THEORY
Sumitava Mukherjee1 & Narayanan Srinivasan2
1 IIT Gandhinagar, India
2CBCS, University of Allahabad, India
Sumitava.inbox@gmail.com , nsrini@cbcs.ac.in
20th Conference on Towards a Science of
Consciousness

2. Overview of this talk
2
 The classical understanding of „unconscious thought‟
 Recent backdrop and empirical findings of
deliberation-without-attention
 Introduction to Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT)
 Examining the core assumptions of UTT
 Unlimited capacity/Weighting or Sub-sampling?
 Nature of “unconscious thought”
 Re-think the way unconscious thought is defined in
UTT

3. Dual systems of thought
3
 Intuition vs Deliberation (e.g., Kahneman, 2011)
 Which is better?
 When?
– old research says intuition better for
easy/learned associations but newer research
says it is better for complex real life problems

4. Unconscious cognition
4
 Psychological unconscious – mental
structures/processes that influence a person‟s
experience, thought and action OUTSIDE of
conscious awareness (Kihlstrom, 1987).
 Conscious perception or action is based on
unconscious/implicit/subliminal/automatized
information (Hemholtz, Freud, Kihlstrom).
 Inacsessible to introspection and knowable only
by inference
 Has historically implied a dis-connection with
attention

5. Different views of the
5
„unconscious‟
 Waste-basket: un-attended percepts and un-
rehersed memories that are subsequently lost
 Substantial pre-conscious: Processes involved in
early stages like feature detection, pattern
recognition
[Both make virtually no contact with “higher”
processes]
 Automatic: Highly complex behavior but outside
awareness (Bargh & Chartland, 1999)
 Powerful unconscious: Unconscious alone and by

6. A bold claim…
6
 When faced with a complex decision, stop
thinking (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006).
 Explicit consideration of options and attributes
overwhelms our limited capacity conscious.
 The unconscious has unlimited capacity and can
therefore weigh information appropriately and
decide optimally.
 Unconscious is capable of performing
tasks/calculations outside of consciousness
 In case of complex multi-attribute decisions,
distracting away from the problem (unconscious
thought) results in better decisions.

7. The deliberation-without-attention
effect: an evidence of a superior
7
unconscious?
Dijksterhuis et al. (2006). Science, 311, 1005- FAILED
1007.

8. The Unconscious Thought Theory
8
(UTT)
 Unconscious cognition is just not suitable for
simple feats (Greenwald, 1992), but the
unconscious is powerful, without capacity
limitations, which uses a bottom-up processing
style, appropriately weights the relative
importance for attributes in decision, engages
in associative processing and divergent
thinking.

9. “Unconscious Thought” Principle in
9
UTT
 The Unconscious Thought Principle asserts
the existence and nature of two kinds of
thought: conscious and unconscious.
Conscious thought is defined as “object-
relevant or task-relevant cognitive or affective
thought processes that occur while the object
or task is the focus of one‟s unconscious
attention,” while unconscious thought simply
occurs when the object or task is outside of
attention (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006).

10. Our concerns with UTT
10
 Core assumptions of UTT
 Unlimitedcapacity & Optimal weighting principle
 Our proposal – a sub-sampling heuristic
 The usage of attention to operationalize
Unconscious Thought – re-look at the
definition.

11. Unlimited capacity or Sub-
11
sampling
(a) Prob.
Sampling +
WADD
(b) Prob.
Sampling +
TALLY
(c) Random
Sampling +
WADD
(d) Random
Sampling +
TALLY
Srinivasan &
Mukherjee, 2010

12. Unlimited capacity or
12
Subsampling

13. Unlimited capacity or
13
Subsampling
 Sub-sampling (Mukherjee & Srinivasan, 2013) can
lead to decently correct choices - there is no need
to posit an infinite capacity for unconscious
thought.
 There is accordingly no convincing data which
suggest that unconscious thought results in
optimal weighting.
 Infact UTT studies haven‟t really looked into how
much information is processed and how.
 Both during conscious and unconscious thought,
they may focus on a small set of important
attributes to arrive at a decent decision.

14. Operationalizing Unconscious
14
Thought
 Unconscious thought is “object relevant or task
relevant cognitive or affective thought
processes that occur while attention is
directed elsewhere” (Dijsksterhuis &
Nordgen, 2006)
 Treats attention as a resource which is
absent[present]
 How attention operates?
 Attention cannot be treated as a unitary
mechanism – Scope of attention?

15. Attentional mechanisms during
15
Unconscious Thought
• Information for 4 cell phones each
having 12 attributes were
1 presented
• Distracter task [Global or Local at
2 low or high working memory load]
• Choice & memory
3
Srinivasan, N., Mukherjee, S., Mishra, M. V., & Kesarwani, S.
(2013)

16. Global vs Local letters
16
examples
Global S Local S

17. Differences in attentional
mechanisms during Unconscious
17
Thought
Main effect of scope:
F(1, 76)= 11.8, p < .01
Effect of load (p=.117)
and interaction
between load and
scope (p=.794) was
not significant
Srinivasan et
al., 2013

18. Differences in attentional
mechanisms during Unconscious
18
Thought
Main effect of scope:
F(1, 76)=6.47, p =
.01.
Effect of load (p=.8)
was not significant but
and interaction was
marginally significant
(p=.058)
Srinivasan et al.,
2013

19. Re-thinking the „Unconscious
19
Thought‟
 Attentional mechanisms during unconscious
thought have profound effects (Srinivasan &
Mukherjee, in press)
 Scope of attention affects many higher order
cognitive processes including complex
decision making
 Unconscious thought cannot be defined using
attention when attentional mechanisms
themselves can affect „unconscious thought‟

20. Conclusions
20
 A need for a proper treatment of attention
 In general theorizing about effects of
conscious vs unconscious processes is
critically dependent on a proper treatment of
attention.
 Conflating both attention and consciousness
would add more confusion to the issue of
unconscious thought in particular and the link
between attention and consciousness in
general

21. Conclusions
21
 The UTT paradigm is not an adequate method to
measure beneficial unconscious thought (if at all there
is; Shanks & Newell, in press)
 The putative „unconscious thought‟ is constrained by
differences in attentional processes employed during
unconscious thought (or is it distracted conscious
thought?) and to differences in selection of information
(Srinivasan & Mukherjee, in press).
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Newell, B. R., & Shanks, D.R. (in press). Unconscious Influences on
Decision Making: A Critical Review. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Srinivasan, N. & Mukherjee, S. (in press). Even 'unconscious thought'
is influenced by attentional mechanisms. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences. (Commentary).

22. References
22
 Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being.
American psychologist, 54, 462.
 Dijksterhuis, A. & Nordgren, L.F. (2006). A theory of unconscious thought.
Perspectives in Psychological Science, 1, 95–109.
 Dijksterhuis, A., Bos, M.W., Nordgren, L.F., van Baaren, R.B. (2006). On making the
right choice: the deliberation-without-attention effect. Science 311, 1005–1007.
 Greenwald, A. G. (1992). New Look 3: Unconscious cognition reclaimed. American
Psychologist, 47(6), 766.
 Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
 Kihlstrom, J. F. (1987). The cognitive unconscious. Science, 237, 1445-1452.
 Mukherjee, S. & Srinivasan, N. (2013). Attention in preferential choice. Progress in
Brain Research, 202, 117-134.
 Srinivasan, N., Mukherjee, S., Mishra, M. V., & Kesarwani, S. (2013). Evaluating the
role of attention in the context of unconscious thought theory: Differential impact of
attentional scope and load on preference and memory. Frontiers in Psychology 4:37.
doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00037