Reyes Gabriel, Sackur Jérôme
1 Facultad de Psicología, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile.
2 Brain and Consciousness Group (EHESS/CNRS/ENS), Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Oct;71(10):2088-2100. doi: 10.1177/1747021817738951. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
The literature in metacognition has argued for many years that introspective access to our own mental content is restricted to the cognitive states associated with the response to a task, such as the level of confidence in a decision or the estimation of the response time; however, the cognitive processes that underlie such states were deemed inaccessible to participants' consciousness. Here, we ask whether participants could introspectively distinguish the cognitive processes that underlie two short-term memory tasks. For this purpose, we asked participants, on a trial-by-trial basis, to report the number of items that they mentally scanned during their short-term memory retrieval, which we have named "subjective number of scanned items." The subjective number of scanned items index was evaluated, in Experiment 1, immediately after a judgment of recency task and, in Experiment 2, after an item recognition task. Finally, in Experiment 3, both tasks were randomly mixed. The results showed that participants' introspection successfully accessed the complexity of the decisional processes.
元认知领域的文献多年来一直认为，对我们自身心理内容的内省式 access 仅限于与任务反应相关的认知状态，比如决策中的信心水平或反应时间的估计；然而，这些状态背后的认知过程被认为是参与者意识无法触及的。在此，我们探究参与者是否能够通过内省区分两个短期记忆任务背后的认知过程。为此，我们要求参与者在每次试验中报告他们在短期记忆检索过程中在脑海中扫描的项目数量，我们将其命名为“主观扫描项目数”。在实验1中，紧接新近性判断任务之后评估主观扫描项目数指标，在实验2中，在项目识别任务之后进行评估。最后，在实验3中，将这两个任务随机混合。结果表明，参与者的内省成功触及了决策过程的复杂性。
