PubMed · 12371261
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Stanley Yeo. Clarifying automatism.. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0160-2527(01)00113-3
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This article is about the clash of two explanatory paradigms, each attempting to account for the same data of human experience. In the first half of the nineteenth century, physiologists investigated reflex actions and applied a recently coined word, "automatism," to describe actions which, although seeming to arise from higher centers, actually result from automatic reaction to sensory stimuli. Experiments with spinal reflexes led to the investigation of the reflex action of the brain or "cerebral automatisms." Reflex actions of this kind were used to explain everything from acting compulsively to composing symphonies. Physiological explanations of phenomena of this kind seemed insufficient to some and, in the 1880s, Frederic Myers and Pierre Janet developed psychological frameworks for understanding these phenomena, positing hidden centers of intelligence at work in the individual, outside ordinary awareness, which produce what came to be called "psychological automatisms." Their attempts to unify this psychological framework with the existing physiological one failed. Nevertheless, their work played a crucial role in paving the way for what Ellenberger called dynamic psychiatry, which accepts the reality of an unconscious dynamic of the psyche.
The possible influence of initial phonological and/or orthographic information on spoken-word processing was examined in six experiments modelled after and extending the work Jakimik, Cole, and Rudnicky (1985). Following Jakimik et al., Experiment 1 used polysyllabic primes with monosyllabic targets (e.g., BUCKLE-BUCK/[symbol: see text]; MYSTERY-MISS,/[symbol: see text]). Experiments 2, 3, and 4 used polysyllabic primes and polysyllabic targets whose initial syllables shared phonological information (e.g., NUISANCE-NOODLE,/[symbol: see text]), orthographic information (e.g., RATIO-RATIFY,/[symbol: see text]), both (e.g., FUNNEL-FUNNY,/[symbol: see text]), or were unrelated (e.g., SERMON-NOODLE,/[symbol: see text]). Participants engaged in a lexical decision (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or a shadowing (Experiment 2) task with a single-trial (Experiments 2 and 3) or subsequent-trial (Experiments 1 and 4) priming procedure. Experiment 5 tested primes and targets that varied in the number of shared graphemes while holding shared phonemes constant at one. Experiment 6 used the procedures of Experiment 2 but a low proportion of related trials. Results revealed that response times were facilitated for prime-target pairs that shared initial phonological and orthographic information. These results were confirmed under conditions when strategic processing was greatly reduced suggesting that phonological and orthographic information is automatically activated during spoken-word processing.
Semantic priming by visually masked, unidentifiable ("subliminal") words occurs robustly when the words appearing as masked primes have been classified earlier in practice as visible targets. It has been argued (Damian, 2001) that practice enables robust subliminal priming by automatizing learned associations between words and the specific motor responses used to classify them. Two experiments demonstrate that, instead, the associations formed in practice that underlie subliminal priming are between words and semantic categories. Visible words classified as pleasant or unpleasant in practice with one set of response key assignments functioned later as subliminal primes with appropriate valence, even when associations of keys with valences were reversed before the test. This result shows that subliminal priming involves unconscious categorization of the prime, rather than just the automatic activation of a practiced stimulus-response mapping.