Abstract
Human subjects can report many items of a cluttered field a few hundred milliseconds after stimulus presentation. This memory decays rapidly and after a second only 3 or 4 items can be stored in working memory. Here we compared the dynamics of objective performance with a measure of subjective report and we observed that 1) Objective performance beyond explicit subjective reports (blindsight) was significantly more pronounced within a short temporal interval and within specific locations of the visual field which were robust across sessions 2) High confidence errors (false beliefs) were largely confined to a small spatial window neighboring the cue. The size of this window did not change in time 3) Subjective confidence showed a moderate but consistent decrease with time, independent of all other experimental factors. Our study allowed us to asses quantitatively the temporal and spatial access to an objective response and to subjective reports.
Highlights
A vast ensemble of stimuli are continuously being processed in parallel by the sensory system, most of which elicit only a brief transient sensory response which fades after few hundred milliseconds without reaching working memory, executive control and consciousness [1,2]
To understand the mechanisms which may lead to the paradoxical high-confidence errors, we explored whether these trials may result from the incorrect localization of an object whose identity has been identified correctly, i.e. whether participants are reporting the letter of a distractor which was present in the array but not in the cued location
3- Correlations and dissociations between objective performance and subjective confidence reports we investigated whether experimental manipulations may dissociate the objective performance and participant’s subjective confidence report, by studying objective performance at a fixed value of the subjective confidence score as a function of the critical experimental variable – the ISI (Figure 2D)
Summary
A vast ensemble of stimuli are continuously being processed in parallel by the sensory system, most of which elicit only a brief transient sensory response which fades after few hundred milliseconds without reaching working memory, executive control and consciousness [1,2]. Observers had a much better memory when required to identify a specific subset of the characters at an interval (Inter Stimulus Interval, ISI) after the presentation of the visual display. We found a marked double dissociation between objective response and subjective confidence: instances in which subjects systematically responded correctly at very low confidence and others in which subjects responded systematically incorrectly with very high confidence in their response These dissociations followed a well determined dependence with temporal and spatial properties of the stimuli, which allowed us to asses quantitatively the temporal course of the elements of the visual scene available for an objective response, and to consciousness
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