On the Nature and Significance of Microslips in Everyday Activities

Abstract

　Psychologists have traditionally made a strong distinction between behavior that is under voluntary, conscious control and behavior that is habitual or automatic. This distinction is supposed to emerge from experience and/or practice: early on in learning a task, an actor is supposed to require conscious, deliberate control for successful performance; whereas, after mastery of the skill is achieved, control appears to be smooth and relatively effortless. In the first case (conscious control) errors in performance are attributed to an inability to plan or organize the action adequately; in the second case (automatic control) errors are supposed to be the consequence of a lapse of attention and control, so-called action slips. The two studies reported here show that the control of everyday habitual skills is not by any means as smooth as it is assumed to be. In the two skills studied here, making a cup of coffee and brushing one's teeth, significant discontinuities were observed even in naturalistic unconstrained performance. These discontinuities, which we dub "microslips" undermine the classical distinction between conscious and automatic control, and also call into question a number of ideas about cognition in action based on that distinction.