ABSTRACT
In cognitive psychology, it has become common to equate controlled with conscious processes, and to oppose them to automatic processes (cf. Wegner & Bargh, 1997; Reingold & Goshen-Gottstein, 1996). This is, at the same time, a widely accepted view of the role of consciousness in cognitive processes: Cognitive processes are controlled processes, and consciousness functions as supervision and control. Controlled and automatic processes, respectively, are defined by a number of characteristics of information processing: The former tend to be more slow, unspecific, errorprone, flexible, sequential and limited in capacity whereas the latter are comparably fast, domain specific, reliable, rigid, parallel, and without any limit of capacity (as compared to controlled processes). Typical examples of controlled processes are attentive problem solving and careful decision making. Typical automatic processes are the detection of features in character recognition, and the control of overlearned motor activities.
