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The role of conscious awareness, and by implication, working memory in the control of action forms the focus of this chapter. Action disorders have formed a rich and intriguing area of neuropsychological study in recent years. In this chapter, a range of the available evidence is reviewed first, followed by an interpretation offered by Frith et al., which relies heavily on the distinction between automatic and non-automatic sources of control. The author begins this chapter by discussing sources of evidence that are broadly consistent with Bargh's theme of the importance of implicit control, going on to consider evidence for which this interpretation appears to be insufficient, leading on to an outline of the Frith et al. (2000) model.

The TTC receives support from a number systematic contrasts between predicative and logophoric control, besides their different behavior in the presence of embedded inflection (the OC-NC Generalization). PRO in predicative control may be [-human] but PRO in logophoric control must be [+human] (because it is linked to a context-participant); the controller can be implicit in logophoric control but not in predicative control (general properties of syntactic predication); and control shift is only possible in logophoric, not predicative contexts. Although the phenomena are partly recognized, their systematic alignment with the type of control is not. Put together, they make a strong case for the underlying duality of OC as expressed in the TTC.

This chapter, which examines the concepts of implicit and deliberate control and their implications for awareness, shows that the effect considered, being associated with strategic control, is more accurately described by implicit control. This suggests that deliberate control needs to be applied as an explanation after implicit control loses its ability to accurately describe the given data. Implicit control describes those forms of learning or memory to which the learner has no access; implicit learning is compared with the explicit form whereby control assures the learner that he or she controls individual actions. Most of the actions and tasks are governed by both implicit and deliberate control, the only difference being the awareness of actions in deliberate control and inaccessible actions in implicit control.

This chapter talks about inexplicit information, a form of information that exists in a system without benefit of any symbolic structure. It distinguishes and clarifies control-implicit information and domain-implicit information as the two types of inexplicit information. The control-implicit type describes information that is implicit in the ‘logic’ or ‘structure’ of the flow of control, while the domain-implicit type is information of a system that is lodged in the environment. The chapter concludes with a description of the explanatory role and program-executing features of the CHESS system.