bioRxiv Preprint ServerAugust 29, 2025Gal R. Chen, Rachel Finkelstein, Ariel Goldstein et al.
preprint
Abundant evidence shows that when listening to speech or reading text, we continuously make predictions about upcoming words. Does this process stop when our mind wanders away and subjective experience becomes decoupled from the content of the speech? Conversely, is word prediction sufficient for conscious experience, or can these processes dissociate? Participants (N = 25) listened to...
A recent discovery documented robust and reliable individual differences in how quickly people become aware of non-conscious visual stimuli (Sklar, Goldstein, et al., 2021). Given the seemingly large role that conscious experiences play in our lives, this trait is likely to be associated with later cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. Here we examine the possible implications of...
The minimalist approach that we develop here is a framework that allows to appreciate how non-conscious processing and conscious contents shape human cognition, broadly defined. It is composed of three simple principles. First, cognitive processes are inherently non-conscious, while their inputs and (interim) outputs may be consciously experienced. Second, non-conscious processes and elements...
In a recent comment on our paper Implicit Working Memory (Hassin, Bargh, Engell, & McCulluch, 2009) Guterman (2010) argued that a possible interpretation of the results of one of our experiments is that "conscious awareness…enabled the participants to find ways to benefit from the predictability…while nullifying the cost." Unfortunately, the data do not support this interpretation....