Seeing Double: Exploring the Phenomenology of Self-Reported Absence of Rivalry in Bistable Pictures

Ambiguous images such as Rubin’s vase-face can be interpreted in at least two different ways. These interpretations are typically taken to be mutually exclusive, and ambiguous images have thus served as models of perceptual competition. Here, we present data that challenges this view. In an online survey, we found that a large proportion of people within the general population reported that the two percepts were not competing but could be perceived simultaneously. Of those who reported that they could see both percepts simultaneously, we invited 17 participants to take part in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. In the scanner, participants saw images that could be interpreted as either a landscape or a face and reported at every point in time whether they perceived predominantly the face, the landscape, or both simultaneously. We explored behavioral and neurophysiological (with fMRI) correlates of the reported subjective experience of entertaining two percepts simultaneously by comparing them to those of the simple percepts (i.e., face or landscape). First, by comparing percept durations, we found that the simultaneous state was as stable as the two other percepts. Second, by measuring blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal levels within the fusiform face area (FFA), occipital face area (OFA) and parahippocampal place area (PPA), we found evidence from objective data that confirmed the subjective reports. While the results in FFA and OFA were not conclusive, in PPA, BOLD signal levels during subjective reports of perceiving both a landscape and a face were lower than the BOLD signal levels associated with reports of perceiving a landscape (and, in turn, reports of seeing a landscape were associated with greater BOLD signal levels than reports of seeing a face, thus suggesting that BOLD signal levels in PPA are a valid correlate of subjective experience in this task). In sum, the objective measures suggest that entertaining two percepts simultaneously in mind can be regarded as a distinct (mixed) perceptual state. We argue with these results that a more central role of subjective report in cognitive neuroscience is sometimes warranted

Metacognitive Domains Are Not Aligned along a Dimension of Internal-External Information Source

It is still debated whether metacognition, or the ability to monitor our own mental states, relies on processes that are “domain-general” (a single set of processes can account for the monitoring of any mental process) or “domain-specific” (metacognition is accomplished by a collection of multiple monitoring modules, one for each cognitive domain). It has been speculated that two broad categories of metacognitive processes may exist: those that monitor primarily externally generated versus those that monitor primarily internally generated information. To test this proposed division, we measured metacognitive performance (using m-ratio, a signal detection theoretical measure) in four tasks that could be ranked along an internal-external axis of the source of information, namely memory, motor, visuomotor, and visual tasks. We found correlations between m-ratios in visuomotor and motor tasks, but no correlations between m-ratios in visual and visuomotor tasks, or between motor and memory tasks. While we found no correlation in metacognitive ability between visual and memory tasks, and a positive correlation between visuomotor and motor tasks, we found no evidence for a correlation between motor and memory tasks. This pattern of correlations does not support the grouping of domains based on whether the source of information is primarily internal or external. We suggest that other groupings could be more reflective of the nature of metacognition and discuss the need to consider other non-domain task-features when using correlations as a way to test the underlying shared processes between domains.Peer Reviewe

The Confidence Database

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages. Each dataset is accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (which is available at https://osf.io/s46pr/) contained 145 datasets with data from more than 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. Here we show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimations of several foundational confidence-related effects

Are Judgments of Agency metacognitive? - Study with LEAP motion tracker

Judgments of agency have been assumed to be metacognitive. This assumption is intuitively appealing: In its broad original definition, Metacognition is “cognition about cognition”. This naturally includes the case of agency judgments, which are reports of an experience (the sense of agency). But the term “Metacognition” has evolved from its broad original definition to a narrower one. In a typical perceptual metacognitive task, participants first make a perceptual decision and then rate their confidence in the accuracy of their decision. We argue that this now narrower, more tightly defined concept no longer accommodates the case of agency. In particular, we suggest that the computations described by comparator models are at a different level in a hierarchy of processing than the computations leading to truly metacognitive confidence judgements according to signal detection theory (SDT) models. In order to test whether this is true, we will look for dissociations between judgments of agency (JoA) and confidence at the behavioural level. We will use a task that builds on the paradigm developed by Krugwasser et al (2019). On each trial of the task, participants flex a single finger of their hand, occluded from view. They see instead a virtual hand on a screen where the finger moves together with the real hand, plus a temporal delay. Each participant will complete two tasks: i. JoA (judgments of agency) task: On each trial, participants make a finger movement and rate how much agency they felt over the finger movement displayed on the screen. ii. JoC (judgments of confidence) task: On each trial, participants make two finger movements, separated by an interval indicated by a blank gray screen. They first discriminate which of the two movements displayed on the screen they felt more agency over. Immediately afterwards, they rate how confident they are on their own decision