Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, 4235 TAMU, College Station, TX, 77843-4235, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Oct;25(5):1814-1823. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1412-7.
Cognitive psychologists often distinguish between voluntary and involuntary/automatic processes in attention and cognitive control. Dedicated experimental paradigms have been developed to isolate involuntary information processing, but these paradigms tend to assume a rigid and inflexible process that is either stimulus-driven or built up through simple repetition. In contrast, voluntary information processing is often assumed when processing is in line with arbitrarily defined task-specific goals. Here I review evidence from multiple cases suggesting that ostensibly goal-directed cognitive processes may not be so voluntary and controlled. It is argued that automatic processes can be conditionalized to reflect the task relevance of the stimuli and selection history in a variety of ways, rapidly and flexibly adjusting in order to facilitate future goal-directed behavior. As a result, many studies assumed to have measured a voluntary cognitive process have likely measured an amalgam of voluntary and automatic processes, thus blurring the distinction between the two. Automaticity may be much broader and more sophisticated than has previously been thought, which has wide-reaching implications for our conception of human cognitive control.
认知心理学家通常在注意力和认知控制中区分自愿和非自愿/自动过程。已经开发了专门的实验范式来分离非自愿信息处理，但这些范式往往假设一个僵化和不灵活的过程，要么是由刺激驱动的，要么是通过简单重复建立起来的。相比之下，当处理符合任意定义的特定任务目标时，通常会假设自愿信息处理。在这里，我回顾了多个案例的证据，这些证据表明表面上目标导向的认知过程可能并非如此自愿和可控。有人认为，自动过程可以根据各种方式来反映刺激的任务相关性和选择历史，以便快速灵活地调整，从而促进未来的目标导向行为。因此，许多被认为已经测量了自愿认知过程的研究可能已经测量了自愿和自动过程的混合，从而模糊了两者之间的区别。自动性可能比以前想象的要广泛和复杂得多，这对我们对人类认知控制的概念产生了广泛的影响。
