Introspective Report Research Articles

Introspection, reflection, qualia, & consciousness: Making sense of an 80-hour psychotherapy internship

The following is an introspective report that elaborates on lessons I learned as a trainee psychotherapist during an 80-hour internship at one of Sri Lanka’s state-run hospitals. I have carefully analyzed thoughts, feelings, and emotions associated with three patient cases, and interpreted key learnings via Gibbs reflective cycle. The lessons learned portray a self-realization of a variety of my strengths and weaknesses akin to the practice of psychotherapy. Based on the nature of the content learned, I have identified some of the key areas of professional development that undergird career success. Similarly, making sense of my internal state during these 80 hours through reflective practice displays the mastery of a critical skill for improved training outcomes. This report further highlights the need for more subjective introspective reports from contemporary professionals to establish discourse on consciousness to promote the consideration of subjective accounts of professionals as foundational evidence for more intuitive, logical, and rigorous endeavors of scientific inquiry.

People confabulate with high confidence when their decisions are supported by weak internal variables.

People can introspect on their internal state and report the reasons driving their decisions but choice blindness (CB) experiments suggest that this ability can sometimes be a retrospective illusion. Indeed, when presented with deceptive cues, people justify choices they did not make in the first place, suggesting that external cues largely contribute to introspective processes. Yet, it remains unclear what are the respective contributions of external cues and internal decision variables in forming introspective report. Here, using a brain–computer interface, we show that internal variables continue to be monitored but are less impactful than deceptive external cues during CB episodes. Moreover, we show that deceptive cues overturn the classical relationship between confidence and accuracy: introspective failures are associated with higher confidence than genuine introspective reports. We tracked back the origin of these overconfident confabulations by revealing their prominence when internal decision evidence is weak and variable. Thus, introspection is neither a direct reading of internal variables nor a mere retrospective illusion, but rather reflects the integration of internal decision evidence and external cues, with CB being a special instance where internal evidence is inconsistent.

I Am Conscious, Therefore, I Am: Imagery, Affect, Action, and a General Theory of Behavior.

Organisms are adapted to each other and the environment because there is an inbuilt striving toward security, stability, and equilibrium. A General Theory of Behavior connects imagery, affect, and action with the central executive system we call consciousness, a direct emergent property of cerebral activity. The General Theory is founded on the assumption that the primary motivation of all of consciousness and intentional behavior is psychological homeostasis. Psychological homeostasis is as important to the organization of mind and behavior as physiological homeostasis is to the organization of bodily systems. Consciousness processes quasi-perceptual images independently of the input to the retina and sensorium. Consciousness is the “I am” control center for integration and regulation of (my) thoughts, (my) feelings, and (my) actions with (my) conscious mental imagery as foundation stones. The fundamental, universal conscious desire for psychological homeostasis benefits from the degree of vividness of inner imagery. Imagery vividness, a combination of clarity and liveliness, is beneficial to imagining, remembering, thinking, predicting, planning, and acting. Assessment of vividness using introspective report is validated by objective means such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A significant body of work shows that vividness of visual imagery is determined by the similarity of neural responses in imagery to those occurring in perception of actual objects and performance of activities. I am conscious; therefore, I am.

Use of Smartphone-Based Head-Mounted Display Devices to View a Three-Dimensional Dissection Model in a Virtual Reality Environment: Pilot Questionnaire Study.

BackgroundVirtual reality (VR) technology has started to gain attention as a form of surgical support in medical settings. Likewise, the widespread use of smartphones has resulted in the development of various medical applications; for example, Google Cardboard, which can be used to build simple head-mounted displays (HMDs). However, because of the absence of observed and reported outcomes of the use of three-dimensional (3D) organ models in relevant environments, we have yet to determine the effects of or issues with the use of such VR technology.ObjectiveThe aim of this paper was to study the issues that arise while observing a 3D model of an organ that is created based on an actual surgical case through the use of a smartphone-based simple HMD. Upon completion, we evaluated and gathered feedback on the performance and usability of the simple observation environment we had created.MethodsWe downloaded our data to a smartphone (Galaxy S6; Samsung, Seoul, Korea) and created a simple HMD system using Google Cardboard (Google). A total of 17 medical students performed 2 experiments: an observation conducted by a single observer and another one carried out by multiple observers using a simple HMD. Afterward, they assessed the results by responding to a questionnaire survey.ResultsWe received a largely favorable response in the evaluation of the dissection model, but also a low score because of visually induced motion sickness and eye fatigue. In an introspective report on simultaneous observations made by multiple observers, positive opinions indicated clear image quality and shared understanding, but displeasure caused by visually induced motion sickness, eye fatigue, and hardware problems was also expressed.ConclusionsWe established a simple system that enables multiple persons to observe a 3D model. Although the observation conducted by multiple observers was successful, problems likely arose because of poor smartphone performance. Therefore, smartphone performance improvement may be a key factor in establishing a low-cost and user-friendly 3D observation environment.

When a (precise) awareness measure became a (sketchy) introspective report

When a (precise) awareness measure became a (sketchy) introspective report

Electrophysiological dissociation of the neural correlates of recollection and familiarity

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were employed to investigate electrophysiological correlates of recognition memory in a task that allowed segregation of test items according to whether they were recollected (operationalized by introspective report) or, if recollection failed, their level of familiarity (operationalized by recognition confidence). The amplitude of a negative-going ERP deflection that onsets around 300 ms post-stimulus varied inversely with familiarity strength. This effect was maximal over the left frontal scalp. It did not differ between the ERPs elicited by highly familiar versus recollected items, indicating that the recollection is not merely a consequence of strong familiarity. By contrast, a later positive deflection (onset ca. 500 ms post-stimulus) was enhanced in ERPs elicited by recollected relative to highly familiar items. This effect was maximal over the left posterior scalp and was insensitive to familiarity, as indicated by its absence in the contrast between items judged highly familiar versus highly unfamiliar. The findings constitute a double dissociation between the neural correlates of recollection and familiarity. Together with the results of a parallel functional magnetic resonance imaging study (A.P. Yonelinas et al., J. Neurosci. (2005), 25, 3002–3008), they indicate that recollection and familiarity rely on qualitatively distinct neural systems and strongly support dual-process models of recognition memory.

Does visual perspective matter in imitation?

Theories purporting to explain the cognitive processes underlying imitation and its taxonomic distribution have proliferated in recent years but a common assumption is that imitators must adopt a model's mental or visual perspective. Data on thirty-six adult subjects were used to test the hypothesis that imitative learning of knots would suffer a decrement proportional to the disparity of visual perspectives on the task that the subject held between observation and performance. There was no significant effect of visual perspective on performance, nor was there a trend in the predicted direction. This was in spite of significant preferences on the part of subjects for minimising the angle of disparity, assessed both by their behaviour and introspective report. The cognitive basis for human imitation is discussed in the light of these findings.

子どもはいかに作文を書くか?

The purpose of this paper is to identity children's internal process during production of writings. A new procedure was devised to deal with the problem of estimating the internal dynamics of children from 8 to 12 years of age. At first, a simple procedural model of discourse production was presented; then, where and how long pauses were generated during writing was recorded for each child subject. Each child was also interviewed for the introspective report of what he or she thought at each pause. Then, the model and independently analyzed introspective and behavioral data were studied together to find a new model of the writing process. This procedure succeeded in identifying15strategies that may work in production of writings. Furthermore, the results also suggest the following. First, children's writing plans function not merely for controlling the writing process itself, but also for a global monitoring on whether the ongoing process matched what the writer wanted to do. Second, combination of strategies results in four kinds of writing style, all distributed in the age bracket studied. Thus, writing style seemed to depend mainly on individuals and possibly on contexts, though some age trends were detected.Next, proceeding to more specific problems, two points were investigated by the second and complementary experiment; i. e., whether writing style could be changed externally, and how plan monitoring would work. The first point, flexibility of writing style, was examined in a similar way as the first experiment except that each child was allowed to plan ahead for five minutes before starting writing. The result showed that some (but not all) children were apt to change writing style to one that generated a global plan and work under it. The second point, plan monitoring, was investigated by using recall of subjects' own writings a week later. It was shown that the way to recall depended on the original writing style, and children who wrote in a style with a global plan generally provided, good performance of recall. It implies, at least indirectly, that making global plans were useful for monitoring the process of writing.From the analysis of the model and experimental data, it was suggested that the writing process was a process of adaptively organizing various writing strategies: it might be the cause of an apparent variety of children's writings showing many degrees of freedom of procedural organization in such an adaptive process. But it was also suggested that there existed some constancy in the way using strategies. The set of these two complementary aspects did not seem to be specific to children's writing, thongh. It seemed to reflect the general characteristics of a divergent, ill-structured problem-solving process.

Nonprofessionals in the rehabilitation of mentally disordered sex offenders.

Eighty-six sex offenders were exposed to a 6-month voluntary program of either group encounters (experimental group) or hobbies and games (control group) led by nonprofessionals. Pre- and posttests included a personality test, an introspective report, and a behavior rating scale. Written ward records were assessed as were the results of a postexperimental prisoner evaluation of the experience. Significant changes were evidenced by encounter subjects in improved feelings of approval of the prison-hospital experience, lessened hostility, and better attendance at the meetings. Encounter subjects were improved in the predicted direction on 55 of the 74 treatment dimensions. Community volunteers were judged moderately successful as lay therapists.

A criminal offender introspective report.

The development of a new scale suitable for research with the criminal offender was described. Based on the factor analysis of an item pool delineating sociopathic personality traits, five factors were derived to compose an 80-item criminal offender introspective report (COIR).

Responding to "hypnotic" suggestions: an introspective report.

Abstract The author first presents an introspective report which describes some of his attitudes, motivations, and expectancies and ongoing thought processes while he is responding to ‘hypnotic’ suggestions. The introspective report indicates that (a) suggested effects are experienced when a person thinks with and imaginatively focuses on those things that are suggested and (b) a person imaginatively focuses on the suggestions when he sees the test situation as useful and worthwhile and when he wants to and expects to experience those things that are suggested. It is then argued that the responsive subject in a hypnotic situation differs in every important respect from the sleepwalker and closely resembles the person who is involved in reading an interesting novel or in observing an interesting motion picture. Finally, the author outlines a course, now being developed, that aims to teach individuals how to respond to suggestions.