textarea | Yes, they do exhibit automatic behavior according to Spelke, et al.'s definition. One of the most telling signs of this is their inability to even remember writing some of the dictated words. Because they were unable to even remember back to writing the words, it is apparent that they were able to process the dictated word without having to think about it. This, coupled with the fact that they were able to perform well on reading comprehension tasks, indicate that their behavior did indeed become automatic.   | name | Tucker Meijer | Submit_button_x | 31 | Submit_button_y | 4 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Spelke et al. define automatic behavior as being automatic if it did not involve higher order attentional skills. The subjects were told to pay attention to the reading comprehension, and then the recognition of the words was tested. In a later part of the study, the connections within the dictated words were tested. If the subjects were able to perform cognitive functions on the words (like grouping them into categories) then they would not be doing the writing process of dictation automatically. 

Therefore, in the first part of the experiment, when the subjects were not told to pay attention to the relationships between the words in the dictated list, and where they did not notice the relationships within the dictated list, they were displaying automatic behavior. That is, behavior without any higher order attentional skills.  | name | Rakin Muhtadi | Submit_button_x | 32 | Submit_button_y | 16 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | The only time they exhibited automatic behavior was at the onset of the experiment. This is because this was the only time they seemed to perform a certain behavior without displaying a "higher order attentional skill". They simply wrote what was dictated and paid no attention to the actual meaning of what the wrote. This is supported by the fact that they had no idea about the sublists of words.Every thing else was simply a learned behavior that got better through practice. | name | Advaita Rao- Sharma | Submit_button_x | 0 | Submit_button_y | 0 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | According to Spelke's definition John and Diane's behavior seems to be automatic. Spelke defines an action as automatic when attention is turned away from one of the tasks and that action comes naturally. In this experiment, after multiple weeks of reading and writing the dictated words, John and Diane's attention focussed just on reading comprehension and turned away from the physical writing of the words. After weeks of repeating this process by Spelke's definition their actions became automatic. Because of these automatic behaviors John and Diane were then able to recognize and analyze relations between the words. I do not believe the ability to find relationships between the dictated words makes John and Diane's situation not automatic. After repeating the same process, the actions must come easily and more automatic. With a more automatic behavior the brain can also analyze more.  | name | Geralyn Lam | Submit_button_x | 25 | Submit_button_y | 28 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | John and Diane initially exhibited automatic behavior according to Spelke's definition as for the first couple of weeks of the experiment it was apparent that they did not semantically analyze the dictated words as they were writing them down (they were unable to find the linking factors between the words). However, as the experiment went on and they received different instructions and more practice, John and Diane were able to detect the relation between the words and focus on their meanings as well - because of this obvious cognitive processing of the dictated words, the behavior is no longer considered "automatic." | name | Kelly Kim | Submit_button_x | 23 | Submit_button_y | 20 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Spelke defines automatic behavior as behavior that does not require higher-order attentional skills. In other words, behavior that does not require semantic attention. At first, the writing portion was automatic for John and Diane because they simply acted without paying attention to semantic connections between words, but later were successfully divide their attention between reading and writing and so their behavior was no longer automatic. | name | Eugene Lee | Submit_button_x | 18 | Submit_button_y | 21 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | According to Spelke, et al. (1976), John and Diane did exhibit automatic behavior but later on in the experiment did not exhibit this same automatic behavior. When considering whether or not John and Diane exhibited automatic behavior, Spelke, et al. (1976) had to define what they considered automatic behavior to be. History has shown that the term tends to vary and so the experimenters settled on defining the term as behavior that did not involve certain high-order attentional skills. Based off this definition, the experimenters concluded that originally John and Diane did exhibit automatic behavior since they copied the words without any semantic analysis. In turn, the pair eventually, after practice, succeeded in categorizing dictated words and no longer exhibited automatic behavior based on their definition.  | name | Connor Sheehan  | Submit_button_x | 37 | Submit_button_y | 11 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Yes. As they describe in the last part of their discussion, they term automatic behavior as that in which doe not involve higher order attentional skills. In the first phase of the experiment, the subjects copied words down without drawing any sort of meaning or association to them. Writing the words, in this case, was automatic. As the experiment progressed and the subjects became more practiced in reading and writing simultaneously, both behaviors became less automatic as more attention was given to both, specifically writing words with the ability to extract certain trends/meaning from them. This behavior progressed form automatic to one in which a certain amount of attention was devoted to it.  | name | Jeff Anderson | Submit_button_x | 43 | Submit_button_y | 10 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Spelke et al.’s (1976) definition of automatic behaviour is behaviour that does not involve ‘high-order attentional skills’. Further, they defined attention as a ‘matter of extracting meaning from the world, and perceiving the significance of events’. At the start of the experiment, John and Diane’s behaviour fit the definition of automatism because they failed to notice sentences and categories in the dictated lines, thus showing that they were merely copying words down without paying much, if any, attention to meaning or any specific pattern. However, with further practice and as they were asked to perform different tasks, i.e. analyzing the dictated words semantically and detecting plus describing the sentential relations between them, the two subjects gradually became much better at this challenge. They were eventually able to categorize the dictated words while also keeping up regular reading speeds and maintaining, or at least staying close to, their initial level of comprehension. Thus by the end of the experiment, their writing was no longer ‘automatic’, as defined by Spelke et al.
 | name | Alizeh Sethi  | Submit_button_x | 21 | Submit_button_y | 24 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | To some extent, John and Diane exhibit automatic behavior. By the first definition of automatic processing given, causing no interference of concurrent attentive activity highlights automatic mental process. Since interference was seen when the subjects were asked to write dictations while reading, this marks automaticity of the mental process although we see it gradually disappear with more training. This definition alone is not definitive. Another definition of automatic behavior highlights that attention be regarded as a matter of extracting meaning from the world, and perceiving the significance of events. By this definition, since John and Diane failed to notice sentences and categories in the dictated lines, they were evidently copying the words without much semantic analysis, marking their mental process as automatic. However, in later studies, because they gain the ability to both understood the text they were reading and the words they were copying, they were able to extract meaning simultaneously from what they read and from what they heard. At this point, John and Diane no longer exhibiting automatic behavior. From this paper, my understanding of attention is that there are no general limits to attention. Automatic behavior occurs when the demands of attention aren’t high for both concurrent attentive tasks. Practicing concurrent attentive tasks and increasing the demands of attention for both tasks can serve to limit automatic behavior, leading to a decrease in interference and the gain of semantic analysis.  | name | Benaias Esayeas  | Submit_button_x | 15 | Submit_button_y | 10 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | This article defines automatic behavior as behavior performed without using conscious control. In the first part of the experiment- since John and Diane were not asked to remember the words they wrote down while reading the stories but were instead encouraged to focus on the plot of the story, writing the words themselves, and reading as quickly as possible- remembering which words they wrote down was an automatic process, since they were not consciously trying to do it. However, the extent to which they remembered the words they wrote down was not measured in this first part of the study. In the second part of the study attending to the words they wrote down still involved some degree of automatic behavior but the subjects were aware that they were being tested on their memory of the words they wrote down so they might have put forth a conscious effort to remember them. In the second part, many of the words remembered had a certain significance which caused John or Diane to think about them, making them no longer automatically processed. In the second part of the study, the 13 words which did not have a specific reason for recall were likely the result of near-automatic behavior. The fact that John and Diane did not recognize the categories the words were in (especially because they did recognize them in the third part of the study after they had been alerted to their presence) is an example of them not exhibiting automatic behavior in terms of recognition of patterns. This suggests that some types of stimuli may be more easily automatically recognized than others.  | name | Maggie Shea | Submit_button_x | 34 | Submit_button_y | 5 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | An activity or a mental process might be called ‘automatic’ if it caused no interference with a concurrent attentive activity. If this is the case, then their behavior was not at first automatic, because writing down the lists of words did in fact alter their reading speed, which eventually recovered after a while. Since their reading speed was affected, writing down the list of words was an activity that interfered with their reading. Their reading also made it difficult for them to initially find seemingly obvious patterns in words; therefore, it seems as though their behavior was not automatic. | name | Brent Harrison | Submit_button_x | 23 | Submit_button_y | 14 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | After discussing various definitions of automatism, the experimenters bring forth their own understanding of automatism which cannot be considered if higher level mental functioning is present. Being able to extract information from, and analyzing the implications and suggestions a task accompanies, are considered to define higher mental functioning. In the first weeks of John and Diane’s reading and writing sessions, they recalled that they were sometimes not fully aware of their writing. They were unable to see the relations between the words, or their sentence formations. However with repetition and additional semantic practices, they were able to detect their meaning from the words they wrote and their sub-categories. They were, arguably, learning to focus their attention at two different tasks, without doing one of them reflexively- not processing the information at hand.   | name | Yagmur Idil Ozdemir | Submit_button_x | 26 | Submit_button_y | 19 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | According to Spelke, et al., John and Diane did exhibit automatic behavior for the first eight weeks of the study because they were not semantically analyzing the words that were being dictated to them. They were simply copying the words down without much higher-order attention, which is the definition of automatic behavior. However, once the experimenters forced John and Diane to semantically analyze the dictated words by asking them to categorize them, John's and Diane's behavior was no longer automatic. They were utilizing higher-order attention to categorize the words. | name | Alifayaz Abdulzahir | Submit_button_x | 29 | Submit_button_y | 21 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | In the initial experimental condition they did exhibit automatic behavior in writing down the words on dictation. Their inability to recall many words or to recognize the category made up of train, plane, car, skates, et al suggests that the writing occurred without any conscious processing. Once the conditions changed, however, and they were required to recall the dictated words, the behavior was no longer automatic, and was clearly a conscious process requiring attention. | name | Jack Malague | Submit_button_x | 27 | Submit_button_y | 19 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | John and Diane do not exhibit automatic behavior. the definition given in the paper is that behavior is automatic when it doesn't involve higher order attentional skills. While it is true that while John and Diane were learning how to read short stories while writing dictated words, they were writing "automatically" because they paid no real attention to words they were hearing. However, as they were trained, they actually learned to understand the things they heard/read and thus started paying attention. According to the researchers' definition of automatic behavior, John and Diane were not writing and reading automatically. | name | Shaunpaul Jones | Submit_button_x | 26 | Submit_button_y | 20 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | At first, John and Diane do exhibit automatic behavior in the first weeks of the study. They didn't recognize any category or relationship between the words--in one ear and out the other essentially. But as they learned to look for categories and relationships between the words, and develop the skills to do so while reading comprehensively, John and Diane had to really think about the words given and provide semantic analysis. It was no longer automatic, because it required higher order attention skills. | name | Mae Cromwell | Submit_button_x | 21 | Submit_button_y | 17 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | According to the definition used by Spelke, et al. (1976), Diane and John did not exhibit automatic behavior. Their definition explains automaticity in terms of the amount of attention resources needed to complete the tasks. In other words, the behavior can be deemed automatic if it requires a certain amount of higher-order processing. Since, in the experiments, John and Diane were tested for reading comprehension and categorization of words, both of which require more than just a basic processing of information, the likely conclusion is that neither task was the product of automatic behavior. | name | Yariana Diaz | Submit_button_x | 35 | Submit_button_y | 16 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Spelke et al. considered one definition of automatic behavior to be those actions that a person ceases to be aware of. This definition would give unconclusive results because some participants reported thinking about a word and rehearsing it before writing it down, while at other times paticipants reported that they weren't even aware of their writing.

Another definition of automaticity considered by the researchers was that if it caused no interference with a concurrent attentive activity, that activity is automatic. at first, reading speed declined while words were being dictated, but this decline in ability slowly improved with more practice until reading speed was the same whether or not the particiapnts were writing words.

Spelke et al. preferred the definition of automaticity as behaviors that did not involve certain high order attentional skills. according to this definition, I would say that John and Diane did exhibit automatic behavior. initially in the first few trials, they did not pick up on the superordinate categories that the words they were being dictated came from. that means that there was no higher order processing of the words presented and writing was automatic where one word was written and then forgotten for the next word. however, as reading and writing dictated words was practiced more, the behavior became less automatic since the participants were more likely to correctly categorize the sublists of words into their superordinate groups. in this stage, the words were being rehearsed, or associated with other expriences, for meaning, and therefore the recall of these word lists was higher. | name | Gustavo Marino | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | Submit_button_x | 38 | Submit_button_y | 26 | 
textarea | Spelke et al. define a behavior as automatic if it "did not involve certain high-order attentional skills." They say that attention is a way of extracting meaning from the environment and noticing the significance of certain things. John and Diane at first didn't notice that some words made up particular categories. This behavior was automatic because they weren't really extracting any meaning from the words they were writing down. However, with enough practice they were able to categorize words and extract meaning from them. So by the end of the training, their behavior wasn't automatic. | name | Matthew Bonomo | Submit_button_x | 24 | Submit_button_y | 13 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | I would say that John and Diane initially exhibit automatic behavior, but this behavior eventually becomes non-automatic. Spelke defines behavior as automatic when it involves no higher-order attentional skills. At the beginning of the study, when John and Diane copied the words without semantic analysis, their writing was automatic. However, by the end of the study, as John and Diane learned to analyze and categorize dictated words, their behavior was no longer automatic by Spelke's definition.   | name | Marah Brubaker | Submit_button_x | 30 | Submit_button_y | 20 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Spelke, Hirst, and Neisser preferred the definition that said that behavior would be considered automatic if it did not involve high-order attentional skills (extracting meaning from the world and perceiving the significance of events). In the experiment, John and Diane failed to notice sentences and categories that were hidden in the lines that they dictated. From this observation, it was clear that they were copying the words without encoding their semantic meaning. By their definition, Spelke, Hirst, and Neisser concluded that the writing skills developed by Diane and John were automatic. However, it must be noted that as the conditions of the experiment changed (and Diane and John were allowed to practice), over time they learned to analyze the dictated words semantically and detect sentential relations among them. Both subjects also were able to categorize these words without significant impairments in reading speed or comprehension. At this point, their writing was no longer automatic as it had been in earlier stages. From these observations, Spelke, Hirst, and Neisser concluded that attention is based on "developing and situation-specific skills."  | name | Hope Kim | Submit_button_x | 26 | Submit_button_y | 5 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | According to the authors' definition, John and Diane exhibit automatic behavior in the beginning (first eight weeks) but after practicing the task for awhile, they begin to stray away from automatic behavior. The authors believe this because their definition of automatic behavior pertains to behavior where a person is not extracting meaning or perceiving the significance of the things going on around them. However after the first eight weeks, John and Diane were able to categorize and detect relationships among the words they were writing and therefore were not exhibiting automatic behavior. | name | Christopher Roll | Submit_button_x | 33 | Submit_button_y | 14 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | According to Spelke's definition, a behavior is automatic if it doesn't require "high order attentional skills" to be completed. As such, after much practice, John and Diane were no longer exhibiting automatic behavior. They were able to categorize the words dictated to them, which shows that they were aware of the words being dictated. If it were automatic behavior, John and Diane wouldn't be aware of the words they were writing down.  | name | Annie Chen | Submit_button_x | 23 | Submit_button_y | 5 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Spelke et al choose to use automaticity to refer to behavior performed without "higher order attentional skills", which are employed to investigate the salience and content of stimuli. John and Diane, for the first eight weeks of training, trained their automatic copying of words dictated to them. This behavior can be labeled so as they did not recognize the content of the words they copied. Eventually, they developed the ability to understand the semantic content of words they were given while they read texts, which then brought the behavior past automaticity.  | name | Carlos Johnson-Cruz  | Submit_button_x | 42 | Submit_button_y | 11 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Yes-but only in the beginning. In the early stages of their learning, John and Diane wrote the words automatically because there was no additional demand for them to cognitively recognize or place meaning. However, once they became aware of the tasks at hand, they had to learn to truly divide attention, which is not automatic because it requires extracting meaning, in order to succeed at the task. Thus, in the end, the act of diving attention does not exhibit automatic behavior, but rather learned behavior.  | name | Alexis Sinclair  | Submit_button_x | 25 | Submit_button_y | 13 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | They do at times and don't at other times. They said they were aware of the words they were writing sometimes but other times they were unaware they were writing. Additionally, at the beginning of the study, Spelke, et al. would consider the writing automatic as John and Diane were unable to extract meaning from the sentences. However, by the end of the study John and Diane were able to understand what they were writing which the authors interpret to mean the process being no longer automatic. | name | Ian Kadish | Submit_button_x | 25 | Submit_button_y | 12 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea |      As opposed to more common views that actions, such as driving, might become automatic (without intention, without conscious awareness, without cognitive interference) after practice, Spelke et al. propose a definition of automaticity in which automaticity signifies a behavior that does not involve certain high-order attentional skills. By this definition, John and Diane first developed an automatic behavior and then “learned” to non-automatically do the same task, in both cases not letting the dictation tasks interfere with reading speed and comprehension. The automatic behavior was transcribing the dictated words without noticing their meaning and content, which was then trained to become non-automatic and use high-order attentional skills to sort the words by meaning.
     In describing John and Diane’s early behavior as automatic, Spelke et al align somewhat with Posner and Synder’s conception of automaticity, in that it occurs without interfering with other cognitive functions (reading speed and comprehension). Their definitions are also similar in that an action ceases to be automatic with conscious awareness (Posner & Synder) or with high-order attentional skills (Spelke et al). I am unsure what roll intention plays in Spelke et al’s definition: after all, John and Diane had to be alerted to the meaning groups in their dictation in order to recognize and list them, and only rhyming and not semantic/syntax groups and sentences was recognized without a cue.
 | name | Katerina von Campe | Submit_button_x | 23 | Submit_button_y | 9 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | Spelke, et al.’s preferred definition of automatic behavior is one that would not involve high-order attentional skills, such as deciphering meaning and extracting a structural pattern. In that sense, John and Diane did exhibit automatic behavior at the early stages of the experiments, when they were able to write down dictated words but were not able to detect semantic patterns etc. But with a lot of practice as well as instructions from the experimenters on what to look for, both of them were able to maintain reading speed and comprehension while being able to recognize various categories of the dictated words. Thus, the writing is no longer an automatic behavior because it requires their attention to recognize word relations and form categories.  | name | Phuong-Nghi Pham | Submit_button_x | 23 | Submit_button_y | 16 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | According to the definition of automatic behavior proposed by Spelke et al., John and Diane exhibit behavior that is not automatic during certain points of the experiment, and not-automatic throughout other portions. This is concluded by understanding the definition of automatic behavior that is offered by Spelke et al. within their article on divided attention. As written within the discussion section of the study’s literature, Spelke et. al consider a behavior automatic if “it does not involve certain higher-order attention skills” (228). Continuing, Spelke et al. add that attention can be interpreted as “a matter of extracting meaning from the world, and perceiving the significance of events” (228). Considering these two components of the experimenters’ understanding of automatic processes, it can be determined that John and Diane’s behavior during the study is both automatic and non-automatic, depending on the portion that is being analyzed. At moments in which the subjects were not able to successfully interpret the words that they were being dictated, it can be argued that their behavior was automatic, as no meaning was extracted from the auditory stimulus. This automatic behavior was exhibited during earlier weeks in the experiment, and during intervals in which a new component of the test was added without disclosure. At other points, such as when John and Diane could analyze word patterns, semantics, and categories, their behavior was inherently non-automatic, since they were successfully recognizing the significance of both the words and the story they were reading. In this way, Spelke et al. showed that the categorization of a cognitive process as automatic can change depending on an individual’s exposure to the task at hand. 
 | name | Scott Nelson | Submit_button_x | 0 | Submit_button_y | 0 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html | 
textarea | At the beginning of the experiment, John and Diane exhibited automatic behavior because they weren't finding the meaning behind any of the words they were copying from the dictation. By Spelke's definition of attention, "extracting meaning from the world", John and Diane stopped showing automatic behavior when they learned to contextualize and group the words they were dictated and strengthened their comprehension of their reading.   | name | Sophia Lesperance | Submit_button_x | 27 | Submit_button_y | 16 | success | http://www.amherst.edu/~mdschulkind/firstclass_thanks.html |