Implicit Cognition and Addiction: An Introduction

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. Therefore, 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: