Consciousness is still in business

In a recent study (Hassin, Bargh, Engell, & McCulloch, 2009, Exp. 4) half of the participants were informed of the occasional occurrence of location regularities (patterns) in visual stimulus sets, while the other half was not. Evidence was presented to the effect that uninformed participants extracted the patterns from the displays better than the informed participants. The authors interpret their finding as demonstrating that working memory (WM) can operate non-consciously. However, inspection of the data suggests that rather than being more effective than the informed participants in extracting patterns, uninformed participants were more strongly affected by the “Broken Patterns” that served as misleading cues. Thus whereas the findings may support the possibility of non-conscious operation of low level WM functions, they nevertheless underscore the importance of conscious awareness as far as higher level functions are concerned.