ABSTRACT: Recent research has established several empirical results that are widely
agreed to merit description in terms of unconscious cognition. These findings
come from experiments that use indirect tests for immediate or long-term residues
of barely perceptible, perceptible-but-unattended, or attended-but-forgotten events.
Importantly, these well-established phenomena (insofar as they occur without initially
involving focal attention) are limited to relatively minor cognitive feats. Unconscious
cognition is now solidly established in empirical research, but it appears to
be intellectually much simpler than the sophisticated agency portrayed in psychoanalytic
theory. The strengthened position of unconscious cognitive phenomena can be related
to their fit with the developing neural network (connectionist) theoretical framework
in psychology.