Tulving's (1989) Doctrine of Concordance Revisited.

The Doctrine of Concordance is the assumption that cognitive processes, behavior, and conscious experience are tightly linked. Tulving and Schwartz challenged this, showing that conscious experience can be absent during cognitive tasks or uncorrelated with behavior. Despite progress, some memory research—particularly on dual- vs. single-process theories of recognition memory, remember/know judgments, and retrospective confidence—still implicitly endorses this doctrine. In contrast, research on metacognitive disconnects in learning, recognition illusions, déjà vu, and aha experiences demonstrates dissociations between the mechanisms creating conscious experience and underlying cognitive processes. Understanding these dissociations is key to grasping how the mind operates.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The Doctrine of Concordance is the implicit assumption that cognitive processes, behavior, and phenomenological experience are highly correlated (Tulving, 1989). Tulving challenged this assumption, pointing to domains in which conscious experience did not accompany a particular measured cognitive process and to situations in which consciousness did not correlate with the observable behavior. Schwartz (1999) extended this view, asserting that the underlying cognitive processes that produce conscious experience may differ from those that produce observable behavior. Though research on conscious experience blossomed during the last quarter century and progress has been made in moving past the Doctrine of Concordance, we argue that some subdomains within memory research remain hampered by an implicit endorsement of it. We outline two areas of memory research in which current research and interpretations appear to fall prey to the Doctrine today: research on the dual- vs. single-process theory in recognition memory, including work on remember/know judgments, and research on retrospective memory confidence. We then describe four areas of research that show progress in understanding conscious experience by rejecting the Doctrine of Concordance: These are 1) metacognitive disconnects in the science of learning, 2) recognition illusions, 3) déjà vu experiences, and 4) aha experiences. We claim that there is often a dissociation between the mechanisms that create conscious experience and the underlying cognitive processes that contribute to behaviors, which may seem causally correlated with conscious experience. Disentangling the relations between process, behavior, and conscious experience in the human mind's operation are important to understanding it.