Abstract
People have better metacognitive sensitivity for decisions about the presence compared to the absence of objects. However, it is not only objects themselves that can be present or absent, but also parts of objects and other visual features. Asymmetries in visual search indicate that a disadvantage for representing absence may operate at these levels as well. Furthermore, a processing advantage for surprising signals suggests that a presence/absence asymmetry may be explained by absence being passively represented as a default state, and presence as a default-violating surprise. It is unknown whether the metacognitive asymmetry for judgments about presence and absence extends to these different levels of representation (object, feature, and default violation). To address this question and test for a link between the representation of absence and default reasoning more generally, here we measure metacognitive sensitivity for discrimination judgments between stimuli that are identical except for the presence or absence of a distinguishing feature, and for stimuli that differ in their compliance with an expected default state.
Highlights
At any given moment, there are many more things that are not there than things that are there
A processing advantage for surprising signals suggests that a presence/absence asymmetry may be explained by absence being passively represented as a default state, and presence as a default-violating surprise
It is unknown whether the metacognitive asymmetry for judgments about presence and absence extends to these different levels of representation
Summary
There are many more things that are not there than things that are there. We set out to map out the structure of absence representations by testing for metacognitive asymmetries in the presence and absence of attributes at different levels of representation—from concrete objects, to visual features, to violations of default expectations. While traditional accounts interpreted visual search asymmetries as reflecting a qualitative advantage for the cognitive representation of presence (affording a parallel search in the case of feature-present search only; Treisman and Gormican 1988), other models attribute the asymmetry to differences in the distributions of perceptual signals already at the sensory level (Dosher et al 2004; Vincent 2011). In the case of metacognitive asymmetries, the idea that decisions about absence are qualitatively different from decisions about presence has been challenged by an excellent fit of simple models that assume unequal variance for the signal-present and signalabsent sensory distributions, a model that does not assume any qualitative difference between the two decisions (Kellij et al 2018). Identifying metacognitive asymmetries for abstract cognitive variables such as familiarity could help refine these models, for instance by revealing that representing deviations from a default state is an overarching principle of cognitive organization, one that goes beyond specific features of visual perception
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