Mazor Matan
Department of Experimental Psychology and All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Open Mind (Camb). 2025 Apr 22;9:635-651. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00206. eCollection 2025.
To represent something as absent, one must know that they would know if it were present. This form of counterfactual reasoning critically relies on a : a simplified schema of one's own cognition, which specifies expected perceptual and cognitive states under different world states and affords better monitoring and control over cognitive resources. Here I propose to use inference about absence as a unique window into the structure and function of the mental self-model. I draw on findings from low-level perception, visual search, and long-term memory, in support of the idea that self-knowledge is a computational bottleneck for efficient inference about absence, and show that alternative "direct perception" and "heuristic" accounts either fail to account for empirical data, or implicitly assume a self-model. I end with a vision for an empirical science of self-modelling, where inference about absence provides a cross-cutting framework for probing key features of the mental self-model that are not accessible for introspection.
要将某事物表征为不存在，人们必须知道如果它存在自己就会知晓。这种反事实推理形式严重依赖于一种认知地图：一种对自身认知的简化模式，它规定了在不同世界状态下预期的感知和认知状态，并能更好地监测和控制认知资源。在此，我提议将关于不存在的推理作为洞察心理自我模型结构和功能的独特窗口。我借鉴了来自低级感知、视觉搜索和长期记忆的研究结果，以支持自我知识是高效进行关于不存在的推理的计算瓶颈这一观点，并表明其他“直接感知”和“启发式”解释要么无法解释实证数据，要么隐含地假定了一个自我模型。最后，我展望了一门关于自我建模的实证科学，其中关于不存在的推理为探究心理自我模型那些无法通过内省获取的关键特征提供了一个贯穿各领域的框架。
