ABSTRACT
The idea that certain cognitive processes may operate without conscious awareness is not new. In an extensive review of early philosophical writings, spanning the period A.D. 130 to 1800, Whyte (1978) provided convincing evidence that an acceptance of nonconscious mental operations was widespread well before the origins of contemporary psychology. Paradoxically perhaps, the advent of experimental psychology within the latter half of the nineteenth century served to stifle, rather than to stimulate, endeavors to understand the nature of nonconscious information processing. The reliance placed by early psychological researchers, such as James (1890) and Wundt (1888), on the use of the introspective method to collect the data on which their theories of cognitive processes were constructed, simply placed nonconscious cognition beyond the scope of accepted scientific enquiry.
