Attention, memory and consciousness: Historical context, evolution, and impact of Jacoby’s process dissociation procedure

This article focuses on the last 25 years of the 20^th century when Larry Jacoby had an extraordinary influence in the areas of attention and memory. During a short 3-year period between 1977 and 1980, four benchmark papers in cognitive psychology documented qualitative distinctions between automatic and attention demanding processes. These studies reflected the zeitgeist for Jacoby's early work extending this distinction to memory. Jacoby developed ingenious experimental paradigms to distinguish automatic and attentional processes and boldly explored unconscious influences, when most experimental psychologists were avoiding using such an introspective term. Although this work was powerful, it did not afford a way of quantifying conscious and unconscious contributions to performance, which ultimately led to Jacoby's process dissociation procedure (PDP). Strong assumptions (such as independence of the two processes) were necessary and these have generated controversy in the field. Although there are limitations, the PDP has been remarkably generative in not only understanding the relation between attention and memory but also has been widely extended to other domains within psychology. The present article attempts to capture the energy and enthusiasm in the field during this period in history, which continues to serve as foundational for work in cognitive science and neuroscience.