Correction Without Consciousness in Complex Tasks: Evidence from Typing
Date
2022Author
Pinet, Svetlana
Nozari, Nazbanou
Metadata
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Pinet, S., & Nozari, N. (2022). Correction Without Consciousness in Complex Tasks: Evidence from Typing. Journal of Cognition, 5(1): 11, pp. 1–14. DOI: https://doi. org/10.5334/joc.202
Journal of Cognition
Journal of Cognition
Abstract
It has been demonstrated that with practice, complex tasks can become independent
of conscious control, but even in those cases, repairing errors is thought to remain
dependent on conscious control. This paper reports two studies probing conscious
awareness over repairs in nearly 15,000 typing errors collected from 145 participants
in a single-word typing-to-dictation task. We provide evidence for subconscious repairs
by ruling out alternative accounts, and report two sets of analyses showing that a)
such repairs are not confined to a specific stage of processing and b) that they are
sensitive to the final outcome of repair. A third set of analyses provides a detailed
comparison of the timeline of trials with conscious and subconscious repairs, revealing
that the difference is confined to the repair process itself. We propose an account of
repair processing that accommodates these empirical findings.