ABSTRACT
Everyone knows what automaticity is. It is the immediate, obligatory way we apprehend the world around us. It is the fluent, effortless manner in which we perform skilled behaviors. It is the “popping into mind” of familiar knowledge at the moment we need it. In this chapter, I argue that these intuitions reflect different manifestations of the same underlying process, namely, memory retrieval. I argue that automaticity is a memory phenomenon governed by the theoretical and empirical principles that govern memory. I contrast this automaticity- as-memory view with the modal view, which associates automaticity with limited processing resources, I show that automaticity-as-memory theories do an excellent job of explaining the acquisition of automaticity, and I explore a number of implications of automaticity-as-memory theories, many of which seem counterintuitive from the processing-resource perspective but are readily understandable from the memory perspective. Finally, I explore different varieties of automaticity, asking whether automaticity-as-memory theories can account for the various forms in which automaticity appears.
