PARADIGMS OF INVESTIGATION OF AUTOMATIC AND CONTROLLED PROCESSES

The purpose of this chapter is to present some methodologies that investigate the process of automatization through different paradigms. Initially the search paradigm that is the major empirical paradigm in which automatic and controlled processes are explored is presented; afterwards the Stroop task and the priming paradigm are presented. With the Stroop paradigm we are able to discover that automaticity is influenced by task demand: word reading in adults is an extremely well-learned skill, but in early readers, the effect is not present, or may even be reversed. In the priming paradigm, where the basic design of the experiment is to precede the target stimulus by a neutral warning signal, results showed that when the prime was a poor predictor of the target there was benefit but no cost. When the prime was of high validity the benefit accrued more rapidly than the cost. This effect was interpreted as showing that the allocation of conscious attention takes more time than automatic activation. Then the Merrill procedure with a visual search paradigm is analyzed and finally the clock test of Moron is presented. The Visual search paradigm allows us to manipulate content (e.g. physical and semantic identity) and is mainly linked to the underlying logic of automatized processes implied by learning. The logic of the repeated visual search paradigm is linked to automatized processes implied by learning: automatization typically develops when the same stimuli have to be detected consistently over many trials. In the concluding section some thoughts about the relationship between different paradigms are offered.