Sociology Department, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.
Developmental and Educational Unit, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021 Jan;83(1):512-524. doi: 10.3758/s13414-020-02190-0. Epub 2020 Nov 26.
Detection failures in perceptual tasks can result from different causes: sometimes we may fail to see something because perceptual information is noisy or degraded, and sometimes we may fail to see something due to the limited capacity of attention. Previous work indicates that metacognitive capacities for detection failures may differ depending on the specific stimulus visibility manipulation employed. In this investigation, we measured metacognition while matching performance in two visibility manipulations: phase-scrambling and the attentional blink. As in previous work, metacognitive asymmetries emerged: despite matched type 1 performance, metacognitive ability (measured by area under the ROC curve) for reporting stimulus absence was higher in the attentional blink condition, which was mainly driven by metacognitive ability in correct rejection trials. We performed Signal Detection Theoretic (SDT) modeling of the results, showing that differences in metacognition under equal type I performance can be explained when the variance of the signal and noise distributions are unequal. Specifically, the present study suggests that phase scrambling signal trials have a wider distribution (more variability) than attentional blink signal trials, leading to a larger area under the ROC curve for attentional blink trials where subjects reported stimulus absence. These results provide a theoretical basis for the origin of metacognitive differences on trials where subjects report stimulus absence, and may also explain previous findings where the absence of evidence during detection tasks results in lower metacognitive performance when compared to categorization.
在感知任务中，检测失败可能有不同的原因：有时我们可能无法看到某些东西，是因为感知信息存在噪声或退化；有时我们可能无法看到某些东西，是因为注意力的容量有限。先前的研究表明，对检测失败的元认知能力可能因所采用的特定刺激可见性操作而有所不同。在这项研究中，我们在两种可见性操作中测量了元认知：相位扰乱和注意瞬脱。与之前的工作一样，元认知出现了不对称：尽管 1 型表现匹配，但在注意瞬脱条件下，报告刺激不存在的元认知能力（通过 ROC 曲线下的面积来衡量）更高，这主要是由于正确拒绝试验中的元认知能力驱动。我们对结果进行了信号检测理论（SDT）建模，表明当信号和噪声分布的方差不相等时，在相等的 1 型表现下的元认知差异可以得到解释。具体来说，本研究表明，与注意瞬脱信号试验相比，相位扰乱信号试验的信号分布更宽（变异性更大），导致报告刺激不存在的注意瞬脱试验的 ROC 曲线下面积更大。这些结果为在报告刺激不存在的试验中产生元认知差异的原因提供了理论依据，也可能解释了先前的发现，即在检测任务中没有证据时，与分类相比，元认知表现较低。
