Metacognitive ability has been described as an important predictor of several processes involved ... more Metacognitive ability has been described as an important predictor of several processes involved in learning, including problem-solving. Although this relationship is fairly documented, little is known about the mechanisms that could modulate it. Given its relationship with both constructs, we decided to evaluate the impact of self-knowledge on PS. In addition, we inspected whether emotional (self-reported anxiety) and interpersonal (attitudes towards social interdependence) variables could affect the relationship between metacognition and problem-solving. We tested a sample of 32 undergraduate students and used behavioural tasks and self-report questionnaires. Contrary to the literature, we found no significant relationship between metacognition and problem-solving performance, nor a significant moderating effect when including emotional and interpersonal variables in the model. In contrast, we observed a significant moderating model combining metacognition, self-reported anxiety a...
Metacognition is defined as the capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes. Re... more Metacognition is defined as the capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes. Recently, Carpenter and colleagues (
Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access t... more Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access to complex cognitive processes. This situation derives from the difficulty of experimentally manipulating cognitive processes while abiding by the two contradictory constraints. First, participants must not be aware of the experimental manipulation, otherwise they run the risk of incorporating their knowledge of the experimental manipulation in some rational elaboration. Second, we need an external, third person perspective evidence that the experimental manipulation did impact some relevant cognitive processes. Here, we study introspection during visual searches, and we try to overcome the above dilemma, by presenting a barely visible, ''pre-conscious" cue just before the search array. We aim at influencing the attentional guidance of the search processes, while participants would not notice that fact. Results show that introspection of the complexity of a search process is driven in part by subjective access to its attentional guidance.
Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypo... more Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response impacts cognitive and emotional functioning. Here, we investigate the effects of stress on metacognition, which is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognition. As the frontal lobes have been shown to play a critical role in metacognition, we predicted that under activation of the HPA axis, participants should be less accurate in the assessment of their own performances in a perceptual decision task, irrespective of the effect of stress on the first order perceptual decision itself. To test this prediction, we constituted three groups of high, medium and low stress responders based on cortisol concentration in saliva in response to a standardized psycho-social stress challenge (the Trier Social Stress Test). We then assessed the accuracy of participants' confidence judgments in a visual discrimination task. As predicted, we found that high biological reactivity to stress correlates with lower sensitivity in metacognition. In sum, participants under stress know less when they know and when they do not know.
The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect u... more The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability durin...
It is well established that acute stress produces negative effects on high level cognitive functi... more It is well established that acute stress produces negative effects on high level cognitive functions. However, these effects could be due to the physiological components of the stress response (among which cortisol secretion is prominent), to its psychological concomitants (the thoughts generated by the stressor) or to any combination of those. Our study shows for the first time that the typical cortisol response to stress is sufficient to impair metacognition, that is the ability to monitor one’s own performance in a task. In a pharmacological protocol, we administered either 20 mg hydrocortisone or placebo to 46 male participants, and measured their subjective perception of stress, their performance in a perceptual task, and their metacognitive ability. We found that hydrocortisone selectively impaired metacognitive ability, without affecting task performance or creating a subjective state of stress. In other words, the single physiological response of stress produces a net effect...
In the last decade, there has been a huge effort in cognitive science devoted to the understandin... more In the last decade, there has been a huge effort in cognitive science devoted to the understanding of how individuals access their own cognitive productions. This thesis investigates which mental contents are accessible by introspection. Four experimental projects were developed. The first project investigates the possibility to introspectively access and discriminate complex cognitive processes in the context of a visual search paradigm (serial searches vs. parallel searches). The second project refines the results of the first project. We used a pre-conscious visual cue to alter a visual search, and collected introspective data showing that participants were sensitive to this alteration. The results in both projects converge on three main ideas: 1) introspection is capable of accessing complex cognitive processes; 2) introspection is permeable to different sources of information underlying the experimental task; 3) the focus of introspection can be experimentally controlled during...
Consensus goals in the field of visual metacognition
Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years... more Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term common goals. We describe the process that we followed, the goals themselves, and our plans for accomplishing these goals. If this effort proves successful within the next few years, such consensus-building around common goals could be adopted more widely in psychological science.
Reaction to stressful events has an impact on several cognitive processes. High levels of stress ... more Reaction to stressful events has an impact on several cognitive processes. High levels of stress can be detrimental to working memory, attention and decision-making. Here, we investigated whether individuals’ reactivity to stress is related to their introspective sensitivity (i.e., how well individuals monitor their own cognitive processes). To this aim, 27 participants (16 women, mean 20 years old) were exposed to a psychosocial stress protocol (trier social stress test, TSST), where individuals were asked to simulate a job interview and perform arithmetic calculations in front of a panel of experts. The salivary cortisol concentration, which is considered a hormonal index of stress reactivity, was collected during the TSST through the enzyme immunoassay DRG cortisol ELISA kit. Based on literature recommendations, we classified participants as responders and non-responders to the TSST. In a second session, through a visual search paradigm, we evaluated the introspective sensitivity of the participants. We evaluated how these individuals (i) monitor their own performance (through a confidence estimation), (ii) monitor their own attentional shifts (through a subjective number of scanned items estimation, SNSI), and (iii) monitor their own response times (through an introspective response time estimation, iRT). We found that individuals with lower biological reactivity to stress are more accurate in estimating their SNSI (p = 0.033) and iRT (p = 0.002), and in evaluating their own performance (p = 0.038) through their confidence. We argue that the effect of stress on introspection is not limited to a particular type of introspective evaluation, but rather consists of a general alteration of the introspective mechanism.
Hearing reliability: a common prosodic code automatically signals confidence and honesty to human listeners
The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect u... more The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs such as speech remains largely unknown. Here we show that a common prosodic code signals both confidence and honesty to listeners. Using a novel data-driven method, we decode the prosodic contours driving social attributions of confidence and honesty from speech across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgements about the reliability of a speaker rely on a common prosodic code that is independent from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. We also demonstrate that listeners extract these prosodic signatures of reliability automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize new spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique communicative adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability dur...
In the last decade of research on metacognition, the literature has been focused on understanding... more In the last decade of research on metacognition, the literature has been focused on understanding its mechanism, function and scope; however, little is known about whether metacognitive capacity can be trained. The specificity of the potential training procedure is in particular still largely unknown. In this study, we evaluate whether metacognition is trainable through generic meditation training, and if so, which component of meditation would be instrumental in this improvement. To this end, we evaluated participants' metacognitive efficiency before and after two types of meditation training protocols: the first focused on mental cues (Mental Monitoring [MM] training), whereas the second focused on body cues (Self-observation of the Body [SoB] training). Results indicated that while metacognitive efficiency was stable in MM training group, it was significantly reduced in the SoB group after training. This suggests that metacognition should not be conceived as a stable capacity but rather as a malleable skill. transferred to another metacognitive task. In this last study, metacognition was trained and tested on two laboratory tasks.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2018
The literature in metacognition has argued for many years that introspective access to our own me... more 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....
Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of per... more Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. However, progress has been slowed by the difficulty of collecting new data and the unavailability of existing data. To address this issue, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations, and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analyzed in a variety of software packages. Each dataset is further accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the confidence database (available at osf.io/s46pr) contained 145 datasets with data from over 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. This large collection of data will enable new discoveries and ca...
Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access t... more Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access to complex cognitive processes. This situation derives from the difficulty of experimentally manipulating cognitive processes while abiding by the two contradictory constraints. First, participants must not be aware of the experimental manipulation, otherwise they run the risk of incorporating their knowledge of the experimental manipulation in some rational elaboration. Second, we need an external, third person perspective evidence that the experimental manipulation did impact some relevant cognitive processes. Here, we study introspection during visual searches, and we try to overcome the above dilemma, by presenting a barely visible, ''pre-conscious " cue just before the search array. We aim at influencing the attentional guidance of the search processes, while participants would not notice that fact. Results show that introspection of the complexity of a search process is driven in part by subjective access to its attentional guidance.
Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypo... more Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response impacts cognitive and emotional functioning. Here, we investigate the effects of stress on metacognition, which is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognition. As the frontal lobes have been shown to play a critical role in metacognition, we predicted that under activation of the HPA axis, participants should be less accurate in the assessment of their own performances in a perceptual decision task, irrespective of the effect of stress on the first order perceptual decision itself. To test this prediction, we constituted three groups of high, medium and low stress responders based on cortisol concentration in saliva in response to a standardized psycho-social stress challenge (the Trier Social Stress Test). We then assessed the accuracy of participants' confidence judgments in a visual discrimination task. As predicted, we found that high biological reactivity to stress correlates with lower sensitivity in metacognition. In sum, participants under stress know less when they know and when they do not know.
Recent advances in the field of metacognition have shown that human participants are introspectiv... more Recent advances in the field of metacognition have shown that human participants are introspectively aware of many different cognitive states, such as confidence in a decision. Here we set out to expand the range of experimental introspection by asking whether participants could access, through pure mental monitoring, the nature of the cognitive processes that underlie two visual search tasks: an effortless ''pop-out'' search, and a difficult, effortful, conjunction search. To this aim, in addition to traditional first order performance measures, we instructed participants to give, on a trial-by-trial basis, an estimate of the number of items scanned before a decision was reached. By controlling response times and eye movements, we assessed the contribution of self-observation of behavior in these subjective estimates. Results showed that introspection is a flexible mechanism and that pure mental monitoring of cognitive processes is possible in elementary tasks.
Metacognitive ability has been described as an important predictor of several processes involved ... more Metacognitive ability has been described as an important predictor of several processes involved in learning, including problem-solving. Although this relationship is fairly documented, little is known about the mechanisms that could modulate it. Given its relationship with both constructs, we decided to evaluate the impact of self-knowledge on PS. In addition, we inspected whether emotional (self-reported anxiety) and interpersonal (attitudes towards social interdependence) variables could affect the relationship between metacognition and problem-solving. We tested a sample of 32 undergraduate students and used behavioural tasks and self-report questionnaires. Contrary to the literature, we found no significant relationship between metacognition and problem-solving performance, nor a significant moderating effect when including emotional and interpersonal variables in the model. In contrast, we observed a significant moderating model combining metacognition, self-reported anxiety a...
Metacognition is defined as the capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes. Re... more Metacognition is defined as the capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes. Recently, Carpenter and colleagues (
Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access t... more Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access to complex cognitive processes. This situation derives from the difficulty of experimentally manipulating cognitive processes while abiding by the two contradictory constraints. First, participants must not be aware of the experimental manipulation, otherwise they run the risk of incorporating their knowledge of the experimental manipulation in some rational elaboration. Second, we need an external, third person perspective evidence that the experimental manipulation did impact some relevant cognitive processes. Here, we study introspection during visual searches, and we try to overcome the above dilemma, by presenting a barely visible, ''pre-conscious" cue just before the search array. We aim at influencing the attentional guidance of the search processes, while participants would not notice that fact. Results show that introspection of the complexity of a search process is driven in part by subjective access to its attentional guidance.
Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypo... more Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response impacts cognitive and emotional functioning. Here, we investigate the effects of stress on metacognition, which is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognition. As the frontal lobes have been shown to play a critical role in metacognition, we predicted that under activation of the HPA axis, participants should be less accurate in the assessment of their own performances in a perceptual decision task, irrespective of the effect of stress on the first order perceptual decision itself. To test this prediction, we constituted three groups of high, medium and low stress responders based on cortisol concentration in saliva in response to a standardized psycho-social stress challenge (the Trier Social Stress Test). We then assessed the accuracy of participants' confidence judgments in a visual discrimination task. As predicted, we found that high biological reactivity to stress correlates with lower sensitivity in metacognition. In sum, participants under stress know less when they know and when they do not know.
The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect u... more The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability durin...
It is well established that acute stress produces negative effects on high level cognitive functi... more It is well established that acute stress produces negative effects on high level cognitive functions. However, these effects could be due to the physiological components of the stress response (among which cortisol secretion is prominent), to its psychological concomitants (the thoughts generated by the stressor) or to any combination of those. Our study shows for the first time that the typical cortisol response to stress is sufficient to impair metacognition, that is the ability to monitor one’s own performance in a task. In a pharmacological protocol, we administered either 20 mg hydrocortisone or placebo to 46 male participants, and measured their subjective perception of stress, their performance in a perceptual task, and their metacognitive ability. We found that hydrocortisone selectively impaired metacognitive ability, without affecting task performance or creating a subjective state of stress. In other words, the single physiological response of stress produces a net effect...
In the last decade, there has been a huge effort in cognitive science devoted to the understandin... more In the last decade, there has been a huge effort in cognitive science devoted to the understanding of how individuals access their own cognitive productions. This thesis investigates which mental contents are accessible by introspection. Four experimental projects were developed. The first project investigates the possibility to introspectively access and discriminate complex cognitive processes in the context of a visual search paradigm (serial searches vs. parallel searches). The second project refines the results of the first project. We used a pre-conscious visual cue to alter a visual search, and collected introspective data showing that participants were sensitive to this alteration. The results in both projects converge on three main ideas: 1) introspection is capable of accessing complex cognitive processes; 2) introspection is permeable to different sources of information underlying the experimental task; 3) the focus of introspection can be experimentally controlled during...
Consensus goals in the field of visual metacognition
Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years... more Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term common goals. We describe the process that we followed, the goals themselves, and our plans for accomplishing these goals. If this effort proves successful within the next few years, such consensus-building around common goals could be adopted more widely in psychological science.
Reaction to stressful events has an impact on several cognitive processes. High levels of stress ... more Reaction to stressful events has an impact on several cognitive processes. High levels of stress can be detrimental to working memory, attention and decision-making. Here, we investigated whether individuals’ reactivity to stress is related to their introspective sensitivity (i.e., how well individuals monitor their own cognitive processes). To this aim, 27 participants (16 women, mean 20 years old) were exposed to a psychosocial stress protocol (trier social stress test, TSST), where individuals were asked to simulate a job interview and perform arithmetic calculations in front of a panel of experts. The salivary cortisol concentration, which is considered a hormonal index of stress reactivity, was collected during the TSST through the enzyme immunoassay DRG cortisol ELISA kit. Based on literature recommendations, we classified participants as responders and non-responders to the TSST. In a second session, through a visual search paradigm, we evaluated the introspective sensitivity of the participants. We evaluated how these individuals (i) monitor their own performance (through a confidence estimation), (ii) monitor their own attentional shifts (through a subjective number of scanned items estimation, SNSI), and (iii) monitor their own response times (through an introspective response time estimation, iRT). We found that individuals with lower biological reactivity to stress are more accurate in estimating their SNSI (p = 0.033) and iRT (p = 0.002), and in evaluating their own performance (p = 0.038) through their confidence. We argue that the effect of stress on introspection is not limited to a particular type of introspective evaluation, but rather consists of a general alteration of the introspective mechanism.
Hearing reliability: a common prosodic code automatically signals confidence and honesty to human listeners
The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect u... more The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs such as speech remains largely unknown. Here we show that a common prosodic code signals both confidence and honesty to listeners. Using a novel data-driven method, we decode the prosodic contours driving social attributions of confidence and honesty from speech across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgements about the reliability of a speaker rely on a common prosodic code that is independent from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. We also demonstrate that listeners extract these prosodic signatures of reliability automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize new spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique communicative adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability dur...
In the last decade of research on metacognition, the literature has been focused on understanding... more In the last decade of research on metacognition, the literature has been focused on understanding its mechanism, function and scope; however, little is known about whether metacognitive capacity can be trained. The specificity of the potential training procedure is in particular still largely unknown. In this study, we evaluate whether metacognition is trainable through generic meditation training, and if so, which component of meditation would be instrumental in this improvement. To this end, we evaluated participants' metacognitive efficiency before and after two types of meditation training protocols: the first focused on mental cues (Mental Monitoring [MM] training), whereas the second focused on body cues (Self-observation of the Body [SoB] training). Results indicated that while metacognitive efficiency was stable in MM training group, it was significantly reduced in the SoB group after training. This suggests that metacognition should not be conceived as a stable capacity but rather as a malleable skill. transferred to another metacognitive task. In this last study, metacognition was trained and tested on two laboratory tasks.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2018
The literature in metacognition has argued for many years that introspective access to our own me... more 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....
Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of per... more Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. However, progress has been slowed by the difficulty of collecting new data and the unavailability of existing data. To address this issue, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations, and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analyzed in a variety of software packages. Each dataset is further accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the confidence database (available at osf.io/s46pr) contained 145 datasets with data from over 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. This large collection of data will enable new discoveries and ca...
Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access t... more Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access to complex cognitive processes. This situation derives from the difficulty of experimentally manipulating cognitive processes while abiding by the two contradictory constraints. First, participants must not be aware of the experimental manipulation, otherwise they run the risk of incorporating their knowledge of the experimental manipulation in some rational elaboration. Second, we need an external, third person perspective evidence that the experimental manipulation did impact some relevant cognitive processes. Here, we study introspection during visual searches, and we try to overcome the above dilemma, by presenting a barely visible, ''pre-conscious " cue just before the search array. We aim at influencing the attentional guidance of the search processes, while participants would not notice that fact. Results show that introspection of the complexity of a search process is driven in part by subjective access to its attentional guidance.
Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypo... more Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response impacts cognitive and emotional functioning. Here, we investigate the effects of stress on metacognition, which is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognition. As the frontal lobes have been shown to play a critical role in metacognition, we predicted that under activation of the HPA axis, participants should be less accurate in the assessment of their own performances in a perceptual decision task, irrespective of the effect of stress on the first order perceptual decision itself. To test this prediction, we constituted three groups of high, medium and low stress responders based on cortisol concentration in saliva in response to a standardized psycho-social stress challenge (the Trier Social Stress Test). We then assessed the accuracy of participants' confidence judgments in a visual discrimination task. As predicted, we found that high biological reactivity to stress correlates with lower sensitivity in metacognition. In sum, participants under stress know less when they know and when they do not know.
Recent advances in the field of metacognition have shown that human participants are introspectiv... more Recent advances in the field of metacognition have shown that human participants are introspectively aware of many different cognitive states, such as confidence in a decision. Here we set out to expand the range of experimental introspection by asking whether participants could access, through pure mental monitoring, the nature of the cognitive processes that underlie two visual search tasks: an effortless ''pop-out'' search, and a difficult, effortful, conjunction search. To this aim, in addition to traditional first order performance measures, we instructed participants to give, on a trial-by-trial basis, an estimate of the number of items scanned before a decision was reached. By controlling response times and eye movements, we assessed the contribution of self-observation of behavior in these subjective estimates. Results showed that introspection is a flexible mechanism and that pure mental monitoring of cognitive processes is possible in elementary tasks.
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Papers by Gabriel Reyes