Implicit Cognition and Addiction: An Introduction

Implicit Cognition

Until recently, most research on cognitive processes and drug abuse has focused on theories and methods of explicit cognition. When explicit cognition is assessed, people are asked directly to introspect about the causes of their behavior, usually through traditional questionnaires. It may be questioned, however, to what extent such methods reflect fundamental aspects of human cognition and motivation. Lherefore, basic cognition researchers have turned to indirect methods to assess implicit cognitions, defined as “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate feeling, thought, or action” (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; see De Houwer, chapter 2, for issues regarding the definition of implicit cognition). In this book, we use the term “implicit” to refer to indirect measures as well as to implicit, automatic processes that are likely assessed by these measures (cf. De Houwer, chapter 2). Assessing implicit cognitions has several potential benefits:

• 1.
  Implicit measures may assess cognitive processes that are unavailable to introspection.
• 2.
  These approaches are less sensitive to self-justification and social desirability.
• 3.
  Implicit and explicit cognitions explain unique variance or different aspects of behavior.
• 4.
  Implicit cognition approaches provide a new important bridge between diverse disciplines as well as human and animal research on addiction.

In this handbook, research from a variety of relevant disciplines is brought together for the first time, including major cognitive and biological approaches to addiction, basic research on implicit cognition and dual-process models, and implications of these new views for prevention and treatment are discussed. Lhis is done by experts working in the addictions or in allied fields such as experimental psychopathology, health psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. As editors, we are very happy that many experts doing work in different areas of research (often not directly related to addiction) agreed to contribute to this book. Lhe authors include an approximately equal representation of scholars from North [Page 2]America and Europe, where most of the research on implicit cognition and addiction has been conducted.

In many of the chapters, one of the systems that steers addictive behaviors is an associative system. The importance of associations or connections, broadly defined, can be traced from Aristotle, the British empiricists, and William James to contemporary work on connectionist and associative memory models of memory, modern learning theories, implicit social cognition, and neuroscience. A focus on connections among elements (e.g., concepts, affects, groups of neurons, etc.) is a different way of viewing the basis of cognition than is a focus on the elements themselves or stored facts/if-then rules about those elements (see Deutsch & Strack and McEvoy & Nelson, Chapters 4 and 5, respectively). A simple way to think about connections is that a memory or cognition does not occur in isolation. It is usually triggered (activated or engaged) by something else, either in perception or memory. This “something else” must be connected to the memory or cognition to act as a trigger, and a trigger (e.g., seeing a bottle of wine) may have a hierarchy of strength of connections with other phenomena (e.g., negative affect, positive affect, arousal, nonaffective concepts, images, etc.). Indeed, there is also evidence that associations may automatically trigger actions in the absence of conscious recollection or intentional retrieval (see Palfai, chapter 26). Automatic activation could occur through a number of different architectures, which have different ways of modeling connections and the operation of activation (e.g., Hintzman, 1990; Smith & DeCoster, 1998). Some of these architectures can readily model higher-order cognitions such as schemas (Hintzman, 1986) or emergent properties of cognition (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2002), revealing that patterns of interconnection and activation across multiple units constitute more than “simple associationism.”

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