ABSTRACT
The performances of experts, and our performance of routine everyday actions such as getting dressed or driving to work, pose a serious challenge for a consciousness-centered cognitive theory. These activities are clearly goal-directed, but seem to be performed with a kind of mindlessness often associated with automaticity (Langer, 1978, 1992). Mindlessness in this sense is sometimes evoked to explain how experts are apparently able to attend to high-level aspects of their tasks while performing lower-level components automatically, and how it is that we make such everyday errors as pouring coffee on our breakfast cereal. At the same time, expert and routine performance is closely hilled to environmental regularities, relying on informational support from the environment.
