Introspection reveals covert intentions during serial search (2013)

Abstract

Humans readily introspect upon their thoughts and their behavior, but how reliable are these subjective reports? Is introspection utterly unreliable, as widely believed in cognitive psychology? Or can introspection accurately reflect at least some mental contents? We tested the hypothesis that, during effortful serial behavior, a series of intermediate goals is available for conscious report. On each trial of a serial search task, we recorded eye movements and the participants’ introspection of where their eyes moved. The comparison of reported versus real eye movements revealed that subjects had an accurate introspection of their search path. Although some reported movements did not occur, we show that these reports too are probably accurate, as they capture variance in objective search behavior. The results suggest that introspection has access to most overt and covert shifts of attention during serial search. Our data provide quantitative and qualitative measures of observers’ introspection and reveal experimental effects of visual search that would be inaccessible otherwise.