When you first try to learn how to ride the bike or drive the car, you try to focus your attention and concentrate hard on how to move your feet in relation to your hands and how to orient your head in relation to body posture, balancing etc. the whole thing seems to "flood" your working memory and feels quite difficult and overwhelming. With practice though, the whole thing becomes "automatic", you need less and less deliberate conscious attentional control and your body seems to have a memory of its own, running the whole show while you can focus your attention and working memory on other stuff.
So, "automatic control" is "fast", economic", "unconscious/implicit" but very "specific" and "rigid" (it "masters" quite specific sequences/patterns of information and it is difficult to unlearn) but "executive control" is "slow", "costly", "conscious/explicit" but "flexible" and has many "degrees of freedom" leading to novel associations, generalizations and abstractions.
"Chunking" can be seen as a process of increased "automaticity". If i ask you to recall the digits "tciirdtaamhsaituoy" you will possibly find it quite difficult to hold 18 digits on your working memory (unless you are some kind of prodigious autistic savant or something 😛) but if i rea-arrange the letters to "automaticityishard" the 18 pieces of information becomes 3 and you will possibly find it quite easy. Thanks to "automaticity", language is overlearned and automatic, inducing "order" on "novel" information, freeing your working memory (which can be occupied with other more interesting things!). The experimental psychologist Gordon Logan has a promising model on automaticity.
The "concept" of automaticity seems to be a crucial and basic manifestation of the nervous system. It can be found on various crucial psychological processes and constructs including motor/procedural learning, perceptual priming (when earlier information "primes" the responses of subsequent similar information), "scripts and routine behaviours" (Abelson's concept of a script), overlearned emotional responses and even classical conditioning. The current trend of modern theories of perception, memory, executive functions and even emotion, mental health problems and the "self" itself are "dual-route" theories which contain an "executive-conscious route" and an "automatic-unconscious-route" based on different "cortical-subcortical" regions and circuits. The dual-route approach of executive functions can be summarized in modern versions of Norman and Shallice's "Supervisory Attentional System" (SAS) model.
And some semi-wild theorizing. A lot of problematic mental health processes can be conceptualized as exaggerated negative emotional responses (anxious, panic, traumatic-memory, obsessional states) which become "automatic" and "implicit", intruding consciousness and literally torturing the individual. The current idea of both normal and disordered emotions having both an explicit/executive and an implicit/automatic component can be viewed in Power and Dalgleish's "SPAARS" theory of emotion (read the "Cognition and Emotion" book by the same authors). Traditional CBT talks about "NATs", negative automatic thoughts which are responsible for a mental health condition. The idea of mental health probles and disorders as automatic problematic patterns is hardly new and can be traced back on various theoreticians of late 19th/early 20th century. French neuropsychiatrist De Clarembault conceptualized schizophrenia as "automatized" perceptions which intrude consciousness when the nervous system "is challenged". This could mean (in modern terminology) that when "executive functions" which are based on the frontal lobes become deficient for whatever reason (neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative, traumatic event or substance abuse), responses which were normally "inhibited" surface and "invade" the consciousness of the individual. "Voices" can be seen as "uninhibited" internal dialogue which is associated to various negative (usually) emotional responses. The whole thing (verbal content-negative emotions-cognitive states) becomes automatic and with the executive functions no more in check, it "intrudes" the consciounsess of the person with schizophrenia/psychosis. It is of no surprise then that modern functional imaging studies have found the Basal Ganglia to be crucial for the manifestation of both OCD and Schizhophrenia. The Basal Ganglia are sub-cortical structures which seem to be responsible for motor learning and for the "proceduralization" of processes. Person's with Parkinson's disease have various motor problems and are no more responsible of "recalling" previous over-learned-automatic motor responses. Problems such as Schizophrenia and OCD can be genrated in the opposite way (at least partly) with the basal ganglia "automatizing" responses that they shouldn't normally automatize.
There is no question that "automaticity" is a fundamental process of the nervous system. The problem is that it is summoned for every type of process one can imagine. Whilst "automatic/implicit/procedural memory" can be based on common molecular and cellular mechanisms (some form of LTP maybe?) different types of information can be based on different systems/regions/circuits and hence obey different principles on what, when, how and why information becomes automatized/proceduralized. And what about the cloudy concept of "Semantic memory"? "Semantic memory" is stated for every possible psychological phenomenon one can think of, yet no one knows or can define what exactly "semantic information/content" is. Many would agree that "semantic" information (abstractions/categorizations/analogies) is found between the "explicit/concsious" and the "implicit/uncosncious" but very little is known about this.
Sorry, i got carried away. The concept of automaticity is of great interest to myself and i'm thinking of pursuing a PhD (especially in relation to brain regions and disorders) in that area 😀
