Meuwese Julia D I, van Loon Anouk M, Lamme Victor A F, Fahrenfort Johannes J
Brain & Cognition, Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2014 May;76(4):1057-68. doi: 10.3758/s13414-014-0643-1.
Perceptual decisions seem to be made automatically and almost instantly. Constructing a unitary subjective conscious experience takes more time. For example, when trying to avoid a collision with a car on a foggy road you brake or steer away in a reflex, before realizing you were in a near accident. This subjective aspect of object recognition has been given little attention. We used metacognition (assessed with confidence ratings) to measure subjective experience during object detection and object categorization for degraded and masked objects, while objective performance was matched. Metacognition was equal for degraded and masked objects, but categorization led to higher metacognition than did detection. This effect turned out to be driven by a difference in metacognition for correct rejection trials, which seemed to be caused by an asymmetry of the distractor stimulus: It does not contain object-related information in the detection task, whereas it does contain such information in the categorization task. Strikingly, this asymmetry selectively impacted metacognitive ability when objective performance was matched. This finding reveals a fundamental difference in how humans reflect versus act on information: When matching the amount of information required to perform two tasks at some objective level of accuracy (acting), metacognitive ability (reflecting) is still better in tasks that rely on positive evidence (categorization) than in tasks that rely more strongly on an absence of evidence (detection).
知觉决策似乎是自动且几乎瞬间做出的。构建一个统一的主观意识体验则需要更多时间。例如，在雾天道路上试图避免与汽车相撞时，你会在意识到自己险些遭遇事故之前，就 reflex 地刹车或转向。物体识别的这一主观方面很少受到关注。我们使用元认知（通过信心评级来评估）来测量在物体检测和物体分类过程中对退化和被掩盖物体的主观体验，同时使客观表现相匹配。对于退化和被掩盖的物体，元认知是相同的，但分类导致的元认知高于检测。结果发现，这种效应是由正确拒绝试验中的元认知差异驱动的，这似乎是由干扰刺激的不对称性引起的：在检测任务中它不包含与物体相关的信息，而在分类任务中它确实包含此类信息。引人注目的是，当客观表现相匹配时，这种不对称性选择性地影响了元认知能力。这一发现揭示了人类对信息进行反思与采取行动方式的根本差异：当在某个客观准确水平上匹配执行两项任务所需的信息量（行动）时，在依赖正面证据的任务（分类）中的元认知能力（反思）仍然比在更强烈依赖缺乏证据的任务（检测）中更好。
