BACKGROUND‐The idea that much of our mental life proceeds without conscious awareness has been accepted by philosophers for centuries. After a brief detour in the form of psychoanalytic theory, the idea has in recent decades reemerged as a proper subject of study by cognitive scientists.REVIEW SUMMARY‐Studies of patients who have language disturbance reveal that semantic information and visual word forms of which the patients are consciously unaware are nonetheless capable of producing appropriate behavioral responses. Patients who have severe amnestic disorders are able to learn tasks with no recollection of having been taught. Similar unconscious processing is encountered in patients who have prosopagnosia, blindsight, commissurotomy, and anosognosia and, in normal subjects, in the study of subliminal perception, hypnosis, and the automatic behaviors of daily activity. Such observations are relevant to current notions of parallel distributed processing (connectionism) and of consciousness itself.CONCLUSIONS‐Cognitive science, which includes cognitive psychology, neurobiology, computer science, and linguistics, has replaced psychoanalytic theory as the proper means of studying the mind, and current insights into unconscious cognitive processing are helping to explain unusual clinical phenomena encountered by neurologists.(THE NEUROLOGIST 6:224‐231, 2000)
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