Are specific inspection time strategies prevented by concurrent tasks?

Abstract

To assess whether the movement artifacts reported in visual inspection time (IT) tasks were under metacognitive control, 29 subjects were tested on a dual-task paradigm in which IT was conducted in conjunction with a concurrent, attention-dominating task. The 17 subjects who reported movement artifacts on a simple IT task did not subjectively report them in the dual-task condition, despite their estimated ITs in the dual-task IT situation being lower than those of the 12 subjects who could not perceive apparent motion effects. Subjects who reported movement artifacts had significantly higher verbal ability, but were no different to control subjects on performance measures of ability, or on tests of attention. The IT-IQ correlation was higher for performance measures of ability, for ITs performed in the dual-task condition, and for subjects who had previously reported movement artifacts. With the disappearance of movement artifact reports when conscious attention is allocated predominantly to a concurrent, heavily IQ-loaded task, it is hypthesized that the reports of movement artifacts on IT tasks are largely the product of high-verbal subjects describing processes that are typically preconscious, rather than examples of metacognitive processing.