Nonconscious Goal Pursuit and the Effortful Control of Behavior

Abstract

Abstract This chapter begins with a discussion of existing literature on automatic, nonconscious goal pursuit. It then presents the adaptiveness paradox: on the one hand, in order to be effective, nonconscious goal pursuit must be adaptive. On the other hand, nonconscious, automatic processes are widely believed to rely on existing networks of associations and are hence thought to be inflexible.Three new hypotheses are proposed to resolve the paradox, because at their core lies the contention that working memory (WM) is involved in nonconscious goal pursuit. It is argued that given the nature of WM its involvement in nonconscious goal pursuits allows them to be flexible. A series of studies that focus on one particular type of automatic processes—nonconscious goal pursuit—is reviewed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.