Subconscious

Mental processes and contents that occur outside conscious awareness but may influence thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The term is often used broadly, though psychologists distinguish several kinds of nonconscious processing.

Consciousness: The state of being aware of oneself and one's surroundings, including experiences and thoughts. It marks the awareness boundary that subconscious processes fall outside.
Priming: A change in how a stimulus is processed after exposure to a related stimulus. A prior cue can bias later responses without becoming a conscious memory.
Sigmund Freud: An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and developed influential theories of unconscious mental life. Freud popularized the idea that hidden motives influence conscious thought and behavior.
Cognitive unconscious: Nonconscious information processing studied in cognitive psychology, without assuming repressed wishes or conflicts. It explains hidden processing through ordinary cognition rather than psychoanalytic motivation.
Implicit Association Test: A reaction-time task designed to measure associations that may not be consciously endorsed. It operationalizes automatic associations, while its interpretation and predictive power remain debated.
Unconscious mind: Mental processes and contents inaccessible to conscious awareness, in a broad psychological sense. This overlapping term often names the wider domain meant by subconscious.
Implicit learning: Learning patterns or regularities without conscious knowledge of what has been learned. It shows how behavior can reflect acquired knowledge that a person cannot describe.
Pierre Janet: A French psychologist and physician who studied dissociation and subconscious mental processes. Janet developed an influential account of subconscious activity before Freud's psychoanalytic system.
Repression: A proposed defense mechanism that excludes distressing thoughts or impulses from conscious awareness. It is one specific psychoanalytic explanation for why contents remain outside awareness.
Subliminal stimulus: A stimulus presented below the threshold for conscious detection under specified conditions. It tests whether information can affect responses without reported perception.

Linked from 16 pages