ABSTRACT
The scientific study of psychology began towards the end of the nineteenth century with the ambitious aim of explaining the mental processes involved in conscious human behaviour. Early pioneers such as Wundt, who founded the first psychological laboratory in Germany, realized that many aspects of mental processing of which we are aware are the product of prior levels of ‘unconscious’ processing. In this respect, cognitive processing is not dissimilar from the respiratory or digestive systems: we are usually conscious of the inputs and outputs but need medical science to tell us what happens in between. In attempting to fractionate perceptions, decisions and memories into their elementary components by introspection, the early psychologists came to the conclusion that conscious mental processes were augmented by an integrated set of relatively discrete and largely automatic cognitive processes outside phenomenological awareness.
