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Unconscious Self-processing: Subconscious, Unintentional or Subliminal?

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Book cover Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and Communication

Part of the book series: On Thinking ((ONTHINKING))

Abstract

The existing evidence suggested that self-relevant information is processed in an implicit and automatic manner in many situations. Specifically, the present chapter makes a brief review of empirical evidences which suggest the existence of unconscious self-processing in the situations when the self-relevance of stimuli or task is not registered consciously. According to the characteristics of the existing demonstrations of unconscious self-processing, we classified them into three different categories: “subconscious” or “unrecognized” self-processing, “unintentional” self-processing and “subliminal” self-processing. Integrating evidence of all three categories, one can infer thereby the wide existence of self-processing which is not dependent on subjective activation or awareness of self, and the automatic nature of self-related cognitive or social cognitive processing. For such remarkable phenomena, further efforts must be made to reveal the cognitive mechanism, behavioral effect and neural correlates of the consciousness-independent self-processing, the results of which might contribute to the thorough understanding of the nature of human self.

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Correspondence to Haiyan Geng .

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Geng, H., Xu, S. (2011). Unconscious Self-processing: Subconscious, Unintentional or Subliminal?. In: Han, S., Pöppel, E. (eds) Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and Communication. On Thinking. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15423-2_6

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