Human behavior frequently unfolds with remarkable fluidity, executing intricate sequences of motor and cognitive operations without the necessity of ongoing deliberate calculation. From an experienced pianist sight-reading complex musical scores while conversing to an automobile driver navigating morning traffic while lost in contemplation, human agents continuously delegate sophisticated operations to non-conscious mechanisms. The construct of automatic action stands at the nexus of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, elucidating how practice, evolutionary wiring, and neural plasticity transform labor-intensive mental tasks into rapid, autonomous, and resource-efficient routines.
Automatic Action
1. Concise Definition
An automatic action is an organized cognitive or motor behavior initiated and executed with minimal demand on conscious attention, intentional monitoring, or executive working memory resources. Within cognitive science, it denotes a psychological process characterized by rapid execution, autonomy from moment-to-moment deliberate control, and relative immunity to cognitive interference under conditions of divided attention.
Rather than signifying a complete absence of mental governance, an automatic action represents a specialized mode of processing wherein goal structures and environmental stimuli trigger pre-compiled behavioral schemas. Once acquired through evolutionary adaptation or extensive repetitive practice, these routines execute automatically upon presentation of triggering cues, bypassing the serial, bottlenecked computational pathways characteristic of conscious executive control. Consequently, automaticity frees attentional capacity for high-order decision-making, strategic adaptation, and sensory surveillance.
2. Etymology & Linguistic Origin
The term derives its linguistic heritage from the Classical Greek adjective automatos (αὐτόματος), compounded from autos (αὐτός, meaning “self”) and the Proto-Indo-European root *men- / *matos (denoting “thinking,” “striving,” or “exerting will”). The etymological architecture of the word literally conveys “acting of one’s own will” or “self-moving.” In antiquity, the concept was applied predominantly to natural phenomena that occurred without visible external coercion, such as spontaneous plant growth or mechanical self-operating contrivances described by ancient engineers like Hero of Alexandria.
The noun action traces back to the Latin actio (a doing, performing, or legal proceeding), stemming from the verb agere (“to set in motion, drive, or do”). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, René Descartes and early mechanical philosophers adapted the concept of the automaton to describe bodily reflexes that operated independently of the rational soul. The synthesis of both terms into psychological discourse accelerated in late nineteenth-century psychopathology and experimental psychology, notably through Pierre Janet’s formulation of automatisme psychologique (1889) and William James’s seminal treatises on neuro-behavioral habit formation.
3. Pronunciation & Grammatical Form
In standard English phonetics, the term is pronounced using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as follows:
- Received Pronunciation (British English): /ˌɔː.təˈmæt.ɪk ˈæk.ʃən/
- General American: /ˌɔː.t̬əˈmæt̬.ɪk ˈæk.ʃən/
Grammatically, “automatic action” functions as a composite countable noun phrase. The head noun “action” can take pluralization (“automatic actions”), while the modifier “automatic” serves as a classifying adjective. Related morphological variants include the abstract nominalization automaticity (/ˌɔː.tə.məˈtɪs.ə.ti/), the adverb automatically (/ˌɔː.təˈmæt.ɪ.kli/), and the verb phrase to automatize (/ɔːˈtɒm.ə.taɪz/) or nominalized automatization. In technical literature, the term is frequently juxtaposed with contrasting compounds such as “controlled processing,” “deliberate action,” or “volitional agency.”
4. Detailed Conceptual Explanation
The conceptual architecture of an automatic action revolves around the fundamental trade-off between cognitive flexibility and processing efficiency. The central nervous system operates under strict metabolic and computational constraints, most clearly manifested in the bottleneck of working memory and supervisory attentional resources. If every sensory input required deliberate perceptual evaluation, explicit semantic retrieval, conscious decision formulation, and step-by-step motor programming, human functional capacity would grind to a halt under minimal operational load. Automatic actions resolve this architectural limitation by restructuring computational routines from serial, controlled modalities into parallel, ballistic pipelines.
Historically, cognitive psychologists viewed automaticity as an all-or-nothing dichotomy: an action was either purely controlled or purely automatic. However, contemporary cognitive science treats automaticity as a multidimensional and graded continuum. In a foundational reassessment, social and cognitive psychologist John Bargh articulated the “Four Horsemen of Automaticity,” proposing that an automatic action can be defined across four theoretically independent dimensions:
- Awareness: The degree to which an individual is cognizant of the initiating trigger, the intermediate computational process, or the eventual behavioral outcome.
- Intentionality: Whether the action requires an explicit, active conscious goal to be launched or can be initiated involuntarily purely through environmental stimulation.
- Efficiency: The extent to which the process demands metabolic and attentional resources; highly efficient processes execute smoothly even when working memory is saturated with concurrent dual tasks.
- Controllability: The capacity of the agent to interrupt, inhibit, or alter the execution of the process once it has been triggered.
Neurobiologically, the transition toward automatic action corresponds to a systemic migration of neural activation across distinct cortico-striatal circuits. When an individual initially acquires a complex skill—such as gear-shifting during driving or mastering an instrumental arpeggio—the neural orchestration heavily recruits the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and associative loops connecting the cortex to the caudate nucleus. These structures underpin error-monitoring, working memory maintenance, and deliberate kinetic corrections.
As repetition and associative learning consolidate the behavior, neural efficiency increases. Metabolic demands shift away from the prefrontal supervisory mantle toward the basal ganglia, particularly the sensorimotor striatum (putamen) and the supplementary motor area (SMA). Through this proceduralization process, individual motor syllables and micro-decisions are bound into cohesive “action chunks.” These macroscopic representations run ballistically from start to completion upon retrieval of their contextual tag, demanding virtually no active intervention from frontoparietal networks unless an unexpected environmental mismatch or prediction error is detected.
5. Historical Development
The systematic study of automatic actions developed alongside the birth of empirical psychology in the late nineteenth century. In his landmark 1890 work, The Principles of Psychology, William James dedicated an entire chapter to habit, describing how repetition carves enduring neural pathways through the nervous system. James famously observed that habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed, arguing that by automatizing mundane domestic and administrative behaviors, humanity emancipates the higher strata of mind for creative and abstract deliberation.
Concurrently, in clinical psychopathology, Pierre Janet published L’automatisme psychologique (1889), investigating dissociative states, post-hypnotic suggestion, and hysterical phenomena. Janet conceptualized automatic acts as sub-systems of consciousness that had split off from the primary ego synthesis, operating autonomously beneath the radar of personal introspective awareness. This clinical perspective laid early groundwork for understanding unconscious motor behaviors and subconscious compulsion.
During the mid-twentieth century, the hegemony of behaviorism temporarily reframed automaticity into the language of classical and operant conditioning. Actions were characterized strictly as associative chains linking external discriminative stimuli to overt motor responses without recourse to unobservable internal states. However, the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s reclaimed the internal architecture of automaticity. A transformative milestone arrived in 1977 with the twin papers of Walter Schneider and Richard M. Shiffrin, who formulated the dichotomy between controlled and automatic information processing through visual and memory search experiments.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Gordon Logan challenged structuralist frameworks by advancing the Instance Theory of Automaticity, which grounded automatic execution in memory retrieval rather than algorithmic simplification. Concurrently, social cognitive researchers, spearheaded by John Bargh and Alice Eagly, demonstrated that complex social evaluations, racial prejudices, and goal-directed behavioral cascades could operate with the identical automatic characteristics previously documented in low-level perceptual-motor paradigms. Into the twenty-first century, cognitive neuroscience coupled these behavioral paradigms with functional neuroimaging and computational modeling, establishing automatic actions as central features of predictive coding and Bayesian active inference.
6. Theoretical Foundations
Several complementary theoretical architectures explain the emergence and operation of automatic actions within human cognition:
The most pervasive overarching paradigm is dual-process theory, developed extensively by Jonathan Evans, Keith Stanovich, and Daniel Kahneman. Under this framework, cognitive operations are bifurcated into System 1 (Type 1) and System 2 (Type 2) processes. System 1 embodies automatic actions: it operates autonomously, rapidly, with minimal cognitive burden, and independently of working memory capacity. System 2 embodies deliberate, reflective, and serial processing, governed by conscious intent and rule-following logic. Dual-process theory posits that human agents function as cognitive misers, prioritizing System 1 automatic action defaults whenever possible to conserve energetic resources, deploying System 2 primarily when novelty, conflict, or high-stakes ambiguity demands rigorous intervention.
Complementing this dual-architecture is Gordon Logan’s Instance Theory of Automaticity. Logan argued against the prevailing assumption that practice merely speeds up the general algorithm used to solve a task. Instead, Logan proposed that automaticity represents a profound qualitative shift from general algorithmic computation to direct single-step memory retrieval. When a task is novel, an agent must execute an algorithm (e.g., adding numbers consecutively to compute a multiplication problem). Each encounter with the stimulus produces an episodic memory trace—an “instance.” With extensive practice, an immense bank of instances accumulates in long-term memory. When confronted with the cue again, algorithmic computation and memory retrieval race against one another. Because retrieval speed scales with the volume of stored instances according to the power law of practice, direct memory lookup inevitably outpaces algorithmic reasoning. Thus, an automatic action is achieved when performance relies entirely on immediate exemplar retrieval.
At the level of executive motor governance, Donald Norman and Tim Shallice formulated the Contention Scheduling and Supervisory Attentional System (SAS) model. This architecture proposes that everyday automatic actions are mediated by “schemas”—modular action networks organized hierarchically. In familiar contexts, routine contention scheduling arbitrates among competing schemas through lateral inhibition, resolving action selection automatically on the basis of environmental salience and internal drive. The SAS, localized functionally in the prefrontal cortex, acts as an overarching monitoring agency that intervenes only when contention scheduling fails, when novel actions are attempted, or when errors necessitate immediate schema suppression.
7. Key Components, Types & Dimensions
Automatic actions manifest across perceptual, cognitive, and somatic domains. Scholars classify them across several functional taxonomies:
- Preconscious Automatic Actions: Processes triggered automatically by environmental inputs prior to or completely without conscious perception of the stimulus itself. Subliminal priming, wherein an unperceived prime shapes immediate motor choices, exemplifies this category.
- Postconscious Automatic Actions: Actions that require conscious awareness of an initiating event or prime, but whose subsequent computational execution and behavioral sequelae proceed completely independent of further conscious oversight (e.g., experiential mood shifts or spontaneous cognitive evaluations).
- Goal-Dependent Automaticity: Complex behaviors that necessitate an explicit, intentional starting goal, but once initiated, proceed automatically without continuous volitional guidance. Driving a car along a familiar route or typing words on a keyboard represent goal-dependent automatisms; the broad intent is chosen, but the constituent keystrokes or steering adjustments are enacted autonomously.
- Procedural-Motor Automatism: Over-learned motor repertoires consolidated into the sensorimotor striatum. These include athletic biomechanics, handwriting, speech articulation, and instrumental performance.
- Ideomotor Actions: Covert or overt motor outputs induced immediately by the mere mental representation of the action itself, mediated by shared perceptual-motor coding representations.
- Inhibitory and Corrective Automatism: Non-conscious corrective motor loops, such as rapid postural micro-adjustments mediated by the vestibular and cerebellar pathways during sudden balance perturbations.
8. Examples & Illustrative Cases
The pervasive presence of automatic actions is vividly illuminated through classic experimental paradigms, professional expertise, and routine behavioral lapses:
In experimental psychology, the classical demonstration of uncontrollable automaticity is the Stroop effect. When literate adults are presented with the word “BLUE” printed in bright red ink and instructed to name the ink color as swiftly as possible, they consistently experience significant response latency and error rates. The semantic comprehension of the printed word is so thoroughly automatized that reading cannot be consciously suppressed; the automatic linguistic processing pipeline directly interferes with the deliberate, controlled goal of color naming.
A real-world illustration emerges within vehicular transportation. An experienced commuter routinely departs from work with the conscious intention of stopping at a local pharmacy to retrieve medication. However, upon arriving home, the driver realizes with astonishment that they bypassed the pharmacy turn-off entirely and followed their typical commuting path without interruption. Termed an “action slip” or “capture error,” this phenomenon occurs when an automatic schema (the daily home commute) hijacks behavior because working memory was occupied by a secondary task, such as an engaging podcast or ruminative thought, preventing the prefrontal supervisory attentional system from asserting top-down control.
In the arena of elite athletics, automaticity represents both the hallmark of mastery and a structural vulnerability. A professional tennis player returning a 130-mile-per-hour serve has fewer than 400 milliseconds to calculate trajectory, execute footwork, position the racket face, and swing. The return cannot be planned through conscious step-by-step executive deliberation; it must unfold as an automatic action chunk. Paradoxically, when elite athletes “choke” under acute competitive pressure, neuroimaging and kinematics indicate that conscious anxiety prompts high-level executive functions to forcefully reassert control over automated motor sequences. This internal intervention fragments the fluid, proceduralized action chunk back into isolated, clumsy mechanical steps, drastically degrading performance.
9. Measurement & Assessment
Empirical investigation of automatic actions necessitates sophisticated behavioral paradigms, psychometric indices, and electrophysiological techniques capable of isolating unconscious from conscious processes:
The hallmark laboratory approach utilizes conflict tasks, such as the Stroop task, the Simon spatial incompatibility paradigm, and the Eriksen Flanker task. In these protocols, investigators introduce conflict between an automatic, prepotent response channel and a task-relevant, controlled response channel. By measuring reaction time discrepancies (congruent versus incongruent trials) down to the millisecond level, researchers quantify the processing speed, strength, and uncontrollability of the underlying automatic schema.
Dual-task interference paradigms provide another primary measurement standard. A target task is performed in isolation and concurrently alongside a secondary load designed to saturate working memory, such as retaining a seven-digit alphanumeric string or performing continuous mental arithmetic. If performance on the target task demonstrates zero or negligible degradation under heavy concurrent load, the target action satisfies the diagnostic criteria for cognitive efficiency and automaticity.
To evaluate the intentionality and controllability dimensions, cognitive scientists utilize the Go/No-Go and Stop-Signal Tasks (SST). By introducing a sudden auditory or visual “stop” cue at variable intervals following a target presentation, researchers can calculate the Stop-Signal Reaction Time (SSRT). This metric precisely assesses an individual’s capacity to cancel an initiated, prepotent motor plan before it crosses the physiological threshold into overt physical execution.
Neuroimaging and electrophysiological tools track the biological signatures of automatic action. Electroencephalography (EEG) records event-related potentials (ERPs) such as the Error-Related Negativity (ERN)—a sharp negative deflection occurring within 50 to 100 milliseconds post-motor execution that indicates non-conscious detection of an action slip. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) quantify the decrease in prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals, paired with stable activation in the posterior putamen, cerebellum, and motor cortex, reliably signaling the neurofunctional imprint of automatization.
10. Applications & Practical Significance
The science of automatic action carries vital implications across diverse clinical, educational, occupational, and organizational domains:
In clinical psychology and neuropsychiatry, dysfunctional automaticity underlies severe behavioral pathologies. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and substance dependence represent conditions where normal habit learning mechanisms become hyper-rigidified. Addictive substances chemically distort dopaminergic signaling within the striatum, converting recreational behaviors into deeply entrenched, compulsive automatic actions driven by external environmental triggers (cue-reactivity) that bypass conscious executive override. Conversely, in neurodegenerative conditions affecting the frontostriatal pathways, such as Parkinson’s disease or damage to the medial frontal lobe, patients may suffer from “utilization behavior.” In this syndrome, individuals automatically grasp and utilize objects placed before them (e.g., repeatedly putting on multiple pairs of eyeglasses or drinking from empty cups) entirely because environmental affordances automatically trigger motor schemas that the damaged frontal lobes fail to inhibit.
Within pedagogy and instructional design, the systematic induction of automaticity is a prerequisite for higher-order learning. In reading instruction, foundational literacy hinges on the automatization of orthographic-phonological translation (decoding). Once word recognition achieves complete automaticity, the student’s finite working memory resources are unlocked to engage in high-level text comprehension, critical synthesis, and inferential reasoning. Similar pedagogical models guide early mathematics, where rapid automatic retrieval of basic computational facts prevents cognitive overload during the mastery of algebraic and calculus-level problems.
In industrial ergonomics, human-computer interface design, and aviation safety, understanding automatic actions mitigates catastrophic human error. Designers engineer cockpits and vehicle interfaces to align with established population stereotypes and existing motor habits. In high-stress, emergency scenarios, human operators undergo intense physiological arousal that constricts attentional bandwidth, systematically stripping away System 2 executive deliberative capacity. Operators reflexively regress to automated default actions. If an emergency lever requires a pulling motion while its identical normal counterpart requires a twist, flight crews under existential stress inevitably execute the automated default, often with lethal consequences.
11. Research & Empirical Evidence
A rigorous corpus of empirical evidence illuminates the architecture of automatic actions:
In their seminal 1977 experiments, Richard Shiffrin and Walter Schneider systematically varied target detection tasks across “consistent mapping” (where targets and distractors maintained invariant roles across trials) and “varied mapping” (where items switched roles dynamically). Under consistent mapping, participants underwent hundreds of trials, initially exhibiting slow, serial visual search where reaction times climbed linearly with memory set size. Over time, performance transitioned into a flat, parallel search curve: reaction time became invariant to the number of distractors, and participants described target detection as an effortless “pop-out” phenomenon. Critically, when researchers suddenly inverted the targets and distractors, the participants exhibited profound performance degradation, demonstrating that the newly established automatic action was resistant to immediate conscious reversal.
Gordon Logan’s empirical validation of the Instance Theory (1988) confirmed that the transition to automatic performance across diverse modalities mathematically adheres to the power law of practice: $RT = a + bN^{-c}$, where reaction time ($RT$) drops rapidly initially before asymptoting as the number of trials ($N$) increases. Logan proved that this decay curve precisely models the statistical mechanics of retrieving the fastest available episodic exemplar from long-term memory, confirming that the emergence of automatic action does not require abstract restructuring of procedural steps, but rather reflects empirical scale in accumulated memory traces.
Neuroimaging studies conducted by Russell Poldrack and colleagues (2001) tracked the functional neuroanatomy of proceduralization over extended learning intervals. Their fMRI findings demonstrated a dynamic redistribution of functional activation: initial learning of motor and cognitive classifications engaged intense reciprocal connectivity between the anterior prefrontal cortex, caudate nucleus, and cerebellum. Following thousands of repetitions, prefrontal and caudate activation collapsed, accompanied by a marked upregulation of activity localized to the sensorimotor putamen and supplementary motor cortices. This directly substantiated the neurological migration of behavioral control from supervisory cortical networks to subcortical, striatal automatic action engines.
12. Cultural & Cross-Cultural Considerations
While the basic neurobiological machinery underlying automatic action is universal across the human species, the specific behavioral contents, scripts, and environmental triggers that achieve automaticity are profoundly shaped by culture:
Cultural sociologists and cognitive anthropologists note that social norms, greetings, somatic postures, and conversational turn-taking are internalized through continuous observational enculturation until they operate as fully automatic social actions. For instance, the physical radius of personal space (proxemics) and the micro-behaviors associated with respectful social deference (such as bowing in East Asian societies or firm handshakes in Western business environments) fire postconsciously upon entering culturally designated contextual spaces.
Cross-cultural cognitive research led by Richard Nisbett and colleagues revealed cultural divergences even in perceptual and attentional automatic actions. Western participants, conditioned by individualistic cultural environments, exhibit automated analytic perceptual processing, automatically fixing attention onto focal objects within a visual scene while ignoring background contextual relationships. Conversely, East Asian participants exhibit automated holistic perceptual processing, spontaneously scanning background relationships and contextual environments before fixating on focal objects. Eye-tracking data confirm that these visual saccades unfold within the earliest, preconscious fractions of a second, demonstrating that culture profoundly recalibrates the default, automatic scanning pathways of the human visual system.
13. Criticisms, Debates & Limitations
Despite its theoretical utility, the construct of automatic action has generated significant conceptual debate and empirical contention within psychology:
A primary critique, formulated forcefully by Agnes Moors and Jan De Houwer (2006), targets the classic “feature bundle” assumption. Historically, researchers assumed that if an action exhibited one automatic characteristic (e.g., high efficiency), it necessarily possessed the other three (lack of awareness, involuntary intention, and lack of controllability). Moors and De Houwer demonstrated that these diagnostic features do not consistently correlate as a unified, monolithic syndrome. Many complex behaviors are efficient yet strictly goal-dependent; others are unconscious yet fully interruptible. Consequently, critics argue that declaring an entire action category generically “automatic” obscures distinct underlying mechanisms, urging researchers instead to isolate and measure specific processing features independently.
The field has also wrestled with the “social priming crisis.” During the late 1990s and early 2000s, high-profile studies claimed that subtle, non-conscious automatic actions could be induced through contextual priming—such as exposing college students to words related to the elderly, which allegedly caused them to walk down a hallway more slowly (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). However, widespread replication failures during the 2010s under the Open Science Framework cast doubt on the robustness and effect sizes of behavioral social-priming phenomena. The consensus has shifted toward recognizing that while automaticity is pervasive in overlearned motor, linguistic, and perceptual domains, complex motor cascades cannot be effortlessly manipulated via transient, subliminal social cues.
Finally, philosophical debates continue regarding the boundary between automatic action and human free will. Experimental findings by Benjamin Libet and modern neuroscientists using readiness potentials (RP) demonstrate that subcortical and motor preparation for an action commences several hundred milliseconds before the agent experiences the conscious intention to act. This observation has led some determinist theorists to claim that all human actions are essentially automatic subcortical events, with conscious intentionality serving merely as a post-hoc, confabulatory illusion. In contrast, action theorists argue that while micro-actions are automated, conscious agency operates via top-down prospective configuration, setting macro-goals and exercising “veto” authority (free won’t) over emerging automatic schemas.
14. Related Terms & Distinctions
To preserve diagnostic precision, an automatic action must be differentiated from closely aligned behavioral constructs:
- Habit: While an automatic action describes the operational efficiency and cognitive mechanics of execution, a habit denotes an overarching behavioral script acquired through positive or negative reinforcement that is persistently triggered by specific environmental stimuli, remaining insensitive to immediate reward devaluation. All motor habits rely on automatic actions, but not all automatic actions (e.g., the Stroop effect or optical reflex tracking) are learned behavioral habits.
- Reflex: A reflex is an innate, unlearned, and stereotypic neurophysiological circuit (such as the patellar tap or pupillary light reflex) mediated by simple spinal or brainstem arcs. An automatic action, by contrast, generally represents a learned, cognitively intricate sequence acquired through plastic reorganization of higher-order cortico-striatal circuits.
- Instinct: An instinct refers to complex, genetically pre-programmed behavioral patterns native to an entire biological species (such as avian nest building). Automatic actions are overwhelmingly acquired through individual ontogenetic experience and repetitive training.
- Controlled Processing: The direct operational antithesis of automatic action. Controlled processing requires explicit conscious intent, demands heavy allocations of limited-capacity working memory, progresses sequentially rather than concurrently, and exhibits substantial sensitivity to cognitive interference under dual-task constraints.
- Compulsion: A repetitive, stereotyped action driven by pathological internal tension or anxiety, common in obsessive-compulsive pathology. Although compulsions exhibit features of uncontrollability, they are frequently executed with intense conscious, distressful awareness, differentiating them from fluent, preconscious automaticity.
15. Summary & Key Takeaways
The academic study of automatic action uncovers the intricate architecture of human behavioral competence, illustrating how biological systems navigate finite computational resources:
- Automatic actions represent computational and motor programs that fire and execute with high speed, minimal working memory burden, and significant autonomy from deliberate mental control.
- Contemporary cognitive models discard the all-or-nothing dichotomy, conceptualizing automaticity as a multidimensional spectrum defined by four independent criteria: awareness, intentionality, efficiency, and controllability.
- Neurobiologically, automatization marks a migration of task control away from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and associative caudate toward the sensorimotor striatum (putamen), cerebellum, and supplementary motor area.
- While automatic actions liberate executive cognition for strategic thought and creative problem solving, they create vulnerabilities to behavioral capture errors, action slips, and performance degradation under high-stress conscious monitoring.
Ultimately, the automatic action represents an evolutionary triumph of neurobiological efficiency. Rather than reducing human beings to mindless automatons, the capacity to proceduralize complex sensorimotor and cognitive routines provides the computational foundation upon which creative synthesis, conscious self-reflection, and sophisticated human agency are erected.
References
- Bargh, J. A. (1994). The Four Horsemen of automaticity: Awareness, intention, efficiency, and control in social cognition. In R. S. Wyer & T. K. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of social cognition (2nd ed., pp. 1-40). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Evans, J. S. B., & Stanovich, K. E. (2013). Dual-process theories of higher cognition: Advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(3), 223–241.
- Logan, G. D. (1988). Toward an instance theory of automaticity. Psychological Review, 95(4), 492–527.
- Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326.
- Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84(1), 1–66.