1,721,054 research outputs found
Motivated seeing and unseeing - Exp. 3
No full textAn online experiment, testing the effects of motivation on perceptual decisions in a discrimination task. Using visual gratings instead of images of cats and fish, increasing the offered bonus, and adding two additional lures to the comprehension checks
Expectations effects in search termination
No full textIn two previous studies we used the timing of decisions about absence in a detection task to investigate implicit beliefs about facilitating effects of expectation on perception. We used a paradigm where expected events are detected more readily than unexpected events: subjects are faster to detect letters when surrounded by other letters that make it into a meaningful word. We replicated this effect of context on the timing of decisions about presence, but found that context did not significantly modulate the efficiency of decisions about target absence. This finding is consistent with the absence of metacognitive representation of the facilitating effects of expectations on perception.
Here, we test the generalizability of this finding to a different task (visual search) and type of expectation (stimulus familiarity). We utilize the established finding that searches are easier when the target is unfamiliar and the distractors are familiar compared to the opposite setting (Wang, Cavanagh, & Green, 1994), and use the timing of decisions about absence to ask whether subjects can metacognitively represent this fact, and whether they can use this knowledge to make efficient decisions about target absence. By examining the timing of decisions about target absence in the very first trials of the task (Mazor & Fleming, 2022), we distill stimulus-specific search termination mechanisms from generic criterion-adjustment heuristics (Chun & Wolfe, 1996)
Asymmetry
No full textA study looking at metacognitive and search asymmetries for various stimulus features
Inference about Absence as a Window into the Mental Self-Model
No full textTo represent something as absent, one must know that they would have known if it was present. This form of counterfactual reasoning critically relies on a mental self-model: a simplified schema of one’s own cognition, which specifies expected perceptual and cognitive states under different world states and affords better monitoring and control over cognitive resources. Here I propose to use inference about absence as a unique window into the structure and function of the mental self-model. In contrast to commonly used paradigms, using inference about absence bypasses the need for explicit metacognitive reports. I draw on findings from low-level perception, spatial attention, and episodic memory, in support of the idea that self knowledge is a computational bottleneck for efficient inference about absence, making inference about absence a cross-cutting framework for probing key features of the mental self-model that are not accessible for introspection
Asymmetry
No full textA study looking at metacognitive and search asymmetries for various stimulus features
- …
