Abstract

The implicit information processing hypothesis, although reasonable, meets difficulties both in the methods to verify the so-called "subliminal" effects and, above all, in the controversy about the articulation of the unconscious cognitive processes. We propose a review of the several experimental approaches present in literature, framing them in a three-dimensional space ("the space of experiments") defined by the three principal classes of methods that have characterized the research: a) methods to control and to "inhibit" consciousness, b) methods to measure the real absence of the awareness and c) methods to find the possible "subliminal" effects. We finally illustrate the debate on the level of articulation of the implicit information processing introducing three phenomenons of actual interest used for inhibiting the conscious experience of a stimulus: the inattentional blindness, the change blindness and the attentional blink. They lead to an opening of the problem from a matter of unconscious perception to one of unconscious cognition.