The conceptual separation of automaticity features as a first step toward their separate investigation

Property-based accounts of automaticity have proposed to diagnose automaticity with features such as unintentional, goal-independent, autonomous, purely stimulus-driven, unconscious, uncontrolled (in the sense of alter/stop), efficient, and fast. Contemporary relative views moreover suggest that one should investigate for each automaticity feature separately to what degree it is present. We examine whether features of automaticity can be disentangled on a conceptual level because only then does it make sense to spend efforts on the separate investigation of these features. After a conceptual analysis of eight features of automaticity, we conclude that the conceptual separation of most of these features is indeed possible. Not all authors seem to agree with this position, however, and we show that assumptions of overlap between features is thoroughly pervasive in the literature. These assumptions are not always due to imprecision, but are often ingrained in the information processing model that one implicitly or explicitly adopts, or from the broader metaphor of cognition (computational versus connectionist) on which this model rests. We also discuss some implications of our analysis for future empirical research.status: publishe