ABSTRACT
Research on unconscious processes has long been plagued by theoretical and methodological problems. Consequently, the unconscious was banished, along with consciousness, by radical behaviorists, and has only recently regained respect as a research topic. The resurgence of interest in conscious and unconscious processes is largely due to findings of dissociations between performance on direct and indirect tests of memory and perception. Effects of the past in the absence of remembering, and perceptual analysis in the absence of conscious seeing arise from studies of patients with neurological deficits. Warrington and Weiskrantz (1974) found that amnesics showed little evidence of memory for an earlier-read word list when asked to recall or recognize those words (a direct memory test). However, the amnesics used those words to complete word fragments (an indirect test) more often than if the words had not been seen earlier (see Moscovitch, Vriezen, & Gottstein, 1993, for a review of related research). Similar memory dissociations are evident in people with normal functioning memory (for a review, see Roediger & McDermott, 1993). The form of dissociations found for memory is comparable to dissociations taken as evidence for unconscious perception. For example, Marcel (1983) flashed words for a duration so brief that subjects could not “see” them, but could show effects of those words on a lexical decision task used as an indirect test of perception.
