To Think or not to Think

The dominant view today is that intuitive, nonconscious cognitive processes are limited in their ability to process information. However, recent work provided compelling empirical evidence that following conscious attention to stimuli, nonconscious cognition is better than conscious cognition at processing complex information. These findings bear relevance for higher order cognitive functions such as judgment and decision making, problem solving, and learning. This study replicated some of the original experiments conducted by Dijksterhuis and colleagues (e.g. Dijksterhuis et al. (2006). On making the right choice: The deliberation without attention effect. Science, 311(5763), 1005-1007), and extended them in two ways. First, in addition to stimuli presented in writing graphical stimuli were also used in multiattribute judgment tasks. Second, the study examined the relationship between preferences for analytical and intuitive thinking, performance on the tasks, and the participants\' subjective perception of task difficulty. All data were collected online using a within-subject experimental design.