Final answer:
Unconscious thinking refers to mental processes that occur outside of conscious awareness. It plays a role in decision-making and problem-solving, with a greater impact on novel events compared to familiar events. Unconscious thinking can be influenced by heuristics and is involved in learning processes. The correct answer is option: is most influential with novel events; with familiar events, we react in a more reflective fashion.
Step-by-step explanation:
Unconscious thinking, also known as unconscious cognition, refers to mental processes that occur outside of conscious awareness. It plays a significant role in decision-making and problem-solving. Unconscious thinking tends to be more influential with novel events, while familiar events lead us to react in a more reflective manner. It involves several steps of reasoning and inference, although it may not have a larger-scale impact.
Unconscious thinking can be quite complex and involve unconscious assumptions about how the future will unfold based on recent history. It can also be influenced by heuristics, which are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that we use when making inferences. These mental shortcuts are often unconscious, automated, and efficient, but they are not always correct.
Learning processes, such as associative learning, involve both conscious and unconscious processes. Associative learning occurs when an organism makes connections between stimuli or events that occur together in the environment. Classical conditioning tends to involve unconscious processes, operant conditioning tends to involve conscious processes, and observational learning adds social and cognitive layers to all the basic associative processes, both conscious and unconscious.