1Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam.
Psychol Sci. 2014 Apr;25(4):861-73. doi: 10.1177/0956797613516146. Epub 2014 Feb 18.
The capacity to attend to multiple objects in the visual field is limited. However, introspectively, people feel that they see the whole visual world at once. Some scholars suggest that this introspective feeling is based on short-lived sensory memory representations, whereas others argue that the feeling of seeing more than can be attended to is illusory. Here, we investigated this phenomenon by combining objective memory performance with subjective confidence ratings during a change-detection task. This allowed us to compute a measure of metacognition--the degree of knowledge that subjects have about the correctness of their decisions--for different stages of memory. We show that subjects store more objects in sensory memory than they can attend to but, at the same time, have similar metacognition for sensory memory and working memory representations. This suggests that these subjective impressions are not an illusion but accurate reflections of the richness of visual perception.
人的视觉场景中同时能注意到的物体是有限的。然而，人们内省地感觉自己能同时看到整个视觉世界。一些学者认为这种内省的感觉是基于短暂的感觉记忆表象，而另一些人则认为能看到的比能注意到的更多的感觉是一种错觉。在这里，我们通过在变化检测任务中结合客观记忆表现和主观置信度评分来研究这种现象。这使我们能够为记忆的不同阶段计算元认知的度量，即主体对其决策正确性的了解程度。我们表明，与工作记忆表象相比，主体在感觉记忆中存储的物体比他们能注意到的要多，但同时，他们对感觉记忆和工作记忆表象的元认知是相似的。这表明这些主观印象不是错觉，而是对视觉感知丰富性的准确反映。
