Controlled Processes

Definition

Recall the last time you drove a car. For most people, driving is fairly automatic. People do not have to think about their driving but can instead allow their minds to ponder other issues, such as what to eat for dinner or what to do later. Controlled processes occur when drivers must pay active attention to the road and their driving, such as when a light suddenly turns red, another car cuts into traffic, or when they must figure out where to go.

Controlled processes are mental operations that are intentional, effortful, inefficient, and flexible. That they are intentional means they are under one's deliberate control. A love-struck student, for example, might intentionally choose to stay focused on his or her course readings rather than daydream about his or her lover. Controlled processes are effortful in the sense that they require a relatively large amount of one's attention, and are tiring and taxing. Playing chess, for example, requires controlled processing for most people because they cannot attend to other events around them (e.g., watch a movie, carry on a complex conversation) while simultaneously thinking about the chess game. Likewise, after playing a chess game, most people probably feel somewhat mentally drained or fatigued. This indicates that the chess game probably required effortful controlled processing and drained the chess player's mental energy as a result.

Controlled processes are inefficient because they are slow and cumbersome. Taking a test of analytical reasoning, for example, requires controlled processing because one must take the time to reason through each problem on the test, step by step, until one derives the correct solution. Like solving a math problem, controlled processing requires multiple steps, and each step must be finished before the next one can begin.

Though controlled processes are costly in the sense that they are effortful and inefficient, controlled processes are highly beneficial because of their flexibility. Instead of doing what a person typically does, for instance, he or she can change his or her routine. Rather than go to the pizzeria across the street for lunch every day, a hungry student could deliberately choose to stay home and make a sandwich.

One of the most frequent tests used to examine controlled processes is the Stroop task (named for John Riley Stroop). In one version of this task, people are presented with the words red, blue, and green. Each word appears in red, blue, or green colored ink, and the color ink the word appears in is different from the word's meaning. So, for example, the word red might be shown in blue ink, or the word green might be shown in red ink. For the task, people are asked to state aloud the color that the word appears in and to ignore the meaning of the word. As you can probably imagine, this task is very difficult because it requires a large amount of controlled processing. One must deliberately choose to say the color of the ink and ignore the words' meaning. Among literate individuals, the natural tendency is to read a word immediately upon seeing it (indeed, try to look at a word and not know its meaning immediately), and so it is effortful to refrain from doing so. Performance on the Stroop task is largely inefficient too—people perform the task relatively slowly and cannot perform other tasks (e.g., understand a conversation) while they are doing it. Last, the Stroop task illustrates the flexibility of controlled processing because people can deliberately choose to ignore the meaning of the words. The Stroop task is similar to trying to watch a movie that has subtitles in one's natural language—it oftentimes requires a large amount of controlled effort to ignore the subtitles and pay attention to the movie.

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