Morris Adam
Psychology Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Open Mind (Camb). 2025 Apr 22;9:606-634. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00204. eCollection 2025.
Much of high-level cognition appears inaccessible to consciousness. Countless studies have revealed mental processes-like those underlying our choices, beliefs, judgments, intuitions, etc.-which people do not notice or report, and these findings have had a widespread influence on the theory and application of psychological science. However, the interpretation of these findings is uncertain. Making an analogy to perceptual consciousness research, I argue that much of the unconsciousness of high-level cognition is plausibly due to : missing an otherwise consciously-accessible internal event because your attention was elsewhere. In other words, rather than being structurally unconscious, many higher mental processes might instead be "preconscious", and would become conscious if a person attended to them. I synthesize existing indirect evidence for this claim, argue that it is a foundational and largely untested assumption in many applied interventions (such as therapy and mindfulness practices), and suggest that, with careful experimentation, it could form the basis for a long-sought-after science of introspection training.
许多高级认知过程似乎无法被意识所触及。无数研究揭示了一些心理过程——比如那些构成我们的选择、信念、判断、直觉等基础的心理过程——人们并未注意到或报告这些过程，这些发现对心理科学的理论和应用产生了广泛影响。然而，对这些发现的解释并不确定。通过与知觉意识研究进行类比，我认为高级认知的许多无意识现象可能合理地归因于：由于你的注意力在别处，从而错过了原本可以被意识触及的内部事件。换句话说，许多高级心理过程可能并非在结构上是无意识的，而是“前意识的”，如果一个人关注它们，就会变得有意识。我综合了支持这一观点的现有间接证据，认为这是许多应用干预措施（如治疗和正念练习）中一个基本且在很大程度上未经检验的假设，并表明，通过仔细的实验，它可以成为一门长期以来备受追寻的内省训练科学的基础。
