Process dissociations versus task dissociations: a controversy in progress

This chapter tackles the controversy over process dissociations against task dissociations, including perception-without-awareness, implicit memory research, process-purity, response bias, involuntary conscious memory, the retrieval intentionality criterion, the process-dissociation approach (PDA) assumptions and contributions, the problem of involuntary conscious memory, and the comparison between task-dissociation approach (TDA) and PDA. Some critiques of the PDA tend to be rather selective and biased which leads to the belief that even as the PDA involves predominantly problematic assumptions, the implicit memory TDA is in some way assumption-free. This chapter argues that this distorted impression is largely attributable to the fact that the assumptions regarding TDA are often tacit, unacknowledged, and unexamined. There was also a controversial explicit assumption included in the PDA regarding the relationship of conscious and unconscious memory processes, which is that of the independence between the two processes. This chapter concludes that the PDA and TDA can, and should coexist, and applying these paradigms and then comparing the results obtained may well be very educational and productive.