Ch. 15: Conscious Thought, Unconscious Thought

Action slip

An error in which a person performs some behavior or makes some response that is different from the behavior or response intended

Blind sight

A pattern resulting from brain damage, in which the person seems unable to see in part of their field of vision but can often correctly respond to visual inputs when required to do so by an experimenter

Cognitive unconscious

The broad set of mental acitivites of which people are completely unaware but that make possible ordinary thinking, remembering, reasoning, and so one

Metacognitive skills

Skills that allow people to monitor and control their own mental processes

Metamemory

People’s knowledge about, awareness of, and control over their own memory

Mind-body problem

The difficulty in understanding how the mind (a nonphysical entity) and the body (a physical entity) can influence each other, so that physical events can cause mental events, and mental events can cause physical ones

Neural correlates of consciousness

Events in the nervous system that occur at the same time as, and may be the biological basis of, a specific mental event or state

Neuronal workspace hypothesis

A specific claim about how the brain make conscious experience possible; the proposal is that “workspace neurons” link together the activity of various specialized brain areas, and this linkage makes possible integration and comparison of different types of information

Qualia (sing. quale)

The subjective conscious experiences, or “raw feelings,” of awareness. Examples include the pain of a headache and the exact flavor of chocolate

Subliminal perception

A pattern in which people perceive and are in some ways influenced by inputs they did not consciously notice