Automaticity

Automaticity is a characteristic of cognitive processing in which practiced consistent component behaviors are performed rapidly, with minimal effort or with automatic allocation of attention to the processing of the stimulus. Most skilled behavior requires the development of automatic processes (e.g., walking, READING, driving, programming). Automatic processes generally develop slowly, with practice over hundreds of trials. An example of an automatic process for the skilled reader is encoding letter strings into their semantic meaning. As your eyes fixate on the word "red," a semantic code representing a color and an acoustic image of the phonemes /r/ /e/ /d/ are activated. Automatic processes may occur unintentionally, such as the refocusing of your ATTENTION when you hear your name used in a nearby conversation at a party. Automatic processing can release unintentional behaviors, such as automatic capture errors (e.g., walking out of an elevator when the doors open on an unintended floor).

Automaticity develops when there is a consistent mapping (CM) between the stimuli and responses at some stage of processing. For example, in a letter search task, a subject responds to a set of letters called the "target set" and ignores the "distracter set." If certain letter stimuli are consistently the target set, they will be attended and responded to whenever they occur. Automatic processing will develop with practice and the consistent target letters will attract attention and activate response processes. Automatic targets can be found rapidly in cluttered displays with little effort. Automaticity does not develop when stimuli have a varied mapping (VM) (e.g., when a letter that is a target on one trial is a distracter on the next).

Automatic processing (AP) is often contrasted with controlled or attentive processing. Controlled processing (CP) occurs early in practice, is maintained when there is a varied mapping, and is relatively slow and effortful.

Automatic processing shows seven qualitatively and quantitatively different processing characteristics relative to controlled processing. Automatic processing can be much faster than controlled processing (e.g., 2 ms per category for AP versus 200 ms for CP). Automatic processing is parallel across perceptual channels, memory comparisons, and across levels of processing, whereas controlled processing is serial. Automatic processing requires minimal effort, which enables multitask processing. Automatic processing is robust and highly reliable relative to controlled processing despite fatigue, exhaustion, and the effects of alcohol. On the other hand, automatic processing requires substantial consistent practice, typically hundreds of trials for a single task before accuracy is attained, whereas controlled processing often attains accuracy for a single task in a few trials. Subjects have reduced control of automatic processing, which attracts attention or elicits responses if task demands change relative to the subject's previous consistent training. Automatic processing produces less memory modification than controlled processing, which causes a stimulus to be processed without MEMORY of the processing (e.g., Did you lock the door when leaving the car?).

Models of automaticity seek to account for the characteristics noted above and, in particular, for the contrasts between automatic and controlled processing. They divide into two kinds: incremental learning and instance-based. In the incremental learning models (e.g., James 1890/1950; Laberge 1975; Schneider, Dumais, and Shiffrin 1984), the strength of association between the stimulus and a priority of the signal increases each time a positive stimulus-response sequence occurs. After a sufficient number of such events occur, the priority of the response is sufficient to result in an output of that stage of processing with the minimal need for attention. Stimuli not consistently attended to do not obtain a high priority, hence do not produce an automatic response. In contrast, the instance-based model of Logan (1992), for example, assumes that all instances are stored and the response time is determined by a parallel memory access in which the first retrieved instance determines the reaction time. In this model, the importance of consistency is due to response conflict between the instances slowing the response.

The concept of automaticity has been widely applied to many areas of psychology to interpret processing differences. In the area of attentional processing, it has been applied to interpret effects of processing speed, effort, visual search, and interference effects. In skill acquisition, it has been applied to interpret changes in performance with practice and the development of procedural knowledge. In the understanding of human error, it has been applied to understand unintended automatic behaviors such as capture errors and workload-related errors for controlled processing. In clinical disorders such as schizophrenia, difficulties in maintaining attention can result from too frequent or too few automatic attention shifts, and preservative behavior can result from automatic execution of component skills or lack of memory modification for automatic behaviors. In addictions such as smoking, a major obstacle in breaking a habit is the difficulty of inhibiting automatic behaviors linked to social contexts. In the aging literature, there is evidence that automatic and controlled behaviors may develop and decline differentially with age and that the aged may have more difficulty learning and altering automatic behaviors.

The concept of automatic processing has had a long history in cognitive psychology. The topic of automaticity was a major focus in WILLIAM JAMES's Principles of Psychology (1890/1950). In modern times, automatic processing has been an important issue in the attention literature (Posner and Snyder 1975; Schneider and Shiffrin 1977; Shiffrin 1988) and the skill acquisition literature (Laberge 1975), and the skill acquisition and memory literature (Anderson 1992; Schneider and Detweiler 1987; Logan 1992).

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-- Walter Schneider

References

Anderson, J. R. (1992). Automaticity and the ACT theory. American Journal of Psychology 105:165-180.

James, W. (1890/1950). The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. Authorized edition. New York: Dover.

LaBerge, D. (1975). Acquisition of automatic processing in perceptual and associative learning. In P. M. A. Rabbit and S. Dornic, Eds., Attention and Performance V. New York: Academic Press.

Logan, G. D. (1992). Attention and preattention in theories of automaticity. American Journal of Psychology 105:317-339.

Posner, M. I., and C. R. R. Snyder. (1975). Attention and cognitive control. In R. L. Solso, Ed., Information Processing and Cognition: The Loyola Symposium. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp 55-85.

Schneider, W., and M. Detweiler. (1987). A connectionist/control architecture for working memory. In G. H. Bower, Ed., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 21. New York: Academic Press, pp. 54-119.

Schneider, W., S. T. Dumais, and R. M. Shiffrin. (1984). Automatic and control processing and attention. In R. Parasuraman, R. Davies, and R. J. Beatty, Eds., Varieties of Attention. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1-27.

Schneider, W., and R. M. Shiffrin. (1977). Automatic and controlled information processing in vision. In D. LaBerge and S. J. Samuels, Eds., Basic Processes in Reading: Perception and Comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 127-154.

Shiffrin, R. M. (1988). Attention. In R. C. Atkinson, R. J. Herrnstein, G. Lindzey, and R. D. Luce, Eds., Steven's Handbook of Human Experimental Psychology, vol. 2, Learning and Cognition. New York: Wiley, pp. 739-811.

Automaticity

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