In discussions about the distinctive features of conscious, personal-level as opposed to sub-personal level representations, it is sometimes proposed that conscious, personal-level representations and information processing are special in that one is aware of them. This enables, the proposal continues, the monitoring and control of one’s own cognition, i.e., it allows one to supervise and correct one’s cognition, and to initiate new strategies when difficulty is encountered (e.g., Gennaro 2012; Rolls 2014).
The assumption is that there is no kind of awareness of one’s unconscious, sub-personal representations and information processing that could enable a similar sort of monitoring and control of one’s unconscious cognition.
However, there is reason to believe that this view about the specialness of conscious representations and information processing needs to be revised too. For there is evidence that monitoring and control processes that involve the use of representations about properties of one’s cognition (e.g., the reliability of a perceptual representation, decision uncertainty, or processing fluency; Proust 2013; Shea et al. 2014) can also occur unconsciously.
For example, within the cognitive system, tactile and visual information is integrated in a Bayesian, statistically optimal manner, where more weight is assigned to the channel with less noise, which means that the noise in each channel is unconsciously represented and accommodated (Alais and Burr 2004). Also, subjects tend to adjust their behaviour to the difficulty of a task despite lacking experience of mental effort (Naccache et al. 2005), and make use of unconscious judgments about the reliability of their memory in regulating their performance on recognition tasks (Paulus et al. 2013).
These findings suggest that at least sometimes there is a kind of unconscious awareness of one’s own sub-personal cognition that supports the performance of monitoring and control functions over the representations and processing involved in sub-personal cognition. Personal-level representations and conscious information processing don’t seem to be special in that they can be subject to monitoring and control.
