cognitive unconscious
unreportable mental processes such as implicit percepts, memories, and thoughts. There are many sources of evidence for a cognitive unconscious, including regularities of behavior due to habit or automaticity, inferred grammatical rules, the details of sensorimotor control, and implicit knowledge after brain damage. It differs from the psychoanalytic notion of the dynamic unconscious, which involves material that is excluded from consciousness to avoid anxiety, shame, or guilt. Compare emotional unconscious. See also tacit knowledge. [proposed by U.S. cognitive psychologist John F. Kihlstrom (1948– )]