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Metacognitive Feelings Connect Object Indexes to Looking Behaviours

 

Metacognitive Feelings Connect Object Indexes to Looking Behaviours

[email protected]

object index operations

? ? ? metacognitive feelings

patterns in looking durations

So those who, like me, are impressed by the evidence for the hypothesis that four- and five-month-olds’ abilities to track occluded objects are underpinned by the operations of a system of object indexes are left with a question. The question is, What links the operations of object indexes to patterns in looking duration?
I’ve just argued that it can’t be beliefs or knowledge states. So what is it?
I propose that answering both questions requires us to consider metacognitive feelings ...

metacognitive feelings ... allow a transition from the implicit-automatic mode to the explicit-controlled mode of operation.’

(Koriat, 2000, p. 150)

Koriat, 2000 p. 150

According to Koriat,
Koriat’s focus is adults, but his claim hints that metacognitive feelings might be relevant to understand why the early-developing, automatic belief-tracking process shapes looking duration.
But what are metacognitive feelings?
In thinking about this challenge it may be helpful to focus on the sense of agency.
It’s quite well established that there are feelings of agency, and these seem to arise from a number of cues including ...

Adapted from Sidarus & Haggard, 2016 figure 5

... comparison between outcomes represented motorically and outcomes detected sensorily and ...

Adapted from Sidarus & Haggard, 2016 figure 5

... the fluency of an action selection process (that is, the ease or difficulty involved in selecting one among several possible actions to perform motorically; this can be manipulated by, for example, providing helpful or misleading cues to action (Wenke, Fleming, & Haggard, 2010; Sidarus, Chambon, & Haggard, 2013; Sidarus, Vuorre, & Haggard, 2017)).
The sense of agency is interesting to us because it serves to link two largely independent processes concerned with evaluating whether you are the agent of an event.
One involves detecting these cues ...
the other involves thinking about it, perhaps in the light of your background knowledge.
You can think about whether you are the agent of an event, you don’t need to go with your feelings. When someone asks you whether you felt you were in control, the right answer is to say ‘Well, I don’t know, this is a psychological experiment so there’s a good chance you were tricking me.’ [But despite all of the possible ways in which reflection on the question might lead to a variety of answers, people give replicable answers that seem to reflect fluency. Why? Because they’re answering on the basis of a feeling rather than on the basis of reflection.]
So what is this sense of agency?
First, it phenomenal rather than epistemic. It is an aspect of the phenomenal character of some experience associated with acting. So we can call it a feeling.
Second, it is metacognitive in the sense that it’s normal causes include processes which monitor action selection and production. So we can call it a _metacognitive feeling_.
\footnote{Compare Dokic (2012, p. 310): ‘the causal antecedents of noetic feelings can be said to be metacognitive insofar as they involve implicit monitoring mechanisms that are sensitive to non-intentional properties of first-order cognitive processes.’}
The sense of agency is far from the only metacognitive feeling. Consider a second illustration ... familiarity
Here is a face that I hope will seems familiar to most people. When you see this face, you have a feeling of familiarity. This feeling of familiarity is not just a matter of belief: even if you know for sure that you have never encountered the person depicted here (and trust me, you haven’t), the feeling of familiarity will persist. Nor is the feeling a matter of perceptual experience: you can’t perceptually experience familiarity any more than you can perceptually experience electricity.
What causes feelings of familiarity? Not familiarity as such, it turns out. Instead they are caused by the ease with which you can process the features of a face relative to difficulty of identifying the person. Roughly, the greater the discrepancy between fluency of processing and difficulty of identification, the stronger the feeling of familiarity.
So what is this feeling of familiarity?
First, it phenomenal. It is an aspect of the phenomenal character of some experience associated with acting. So we can call it a feeling.
Second, it is metacognitive in the sense that it’s normal causes include processes which monitor fluency of processing. So we can call it a _metacognitive feeling_.% \footnote{Compare Dokic (2012, p. 310): ‘the causal antecedents of noetic feelings can be said to be metacognitive insofar as they involve implicit monitoring mechanisms that are sensitive to non-intentional properties of first-order cognitive processes.’}
Third, it does not necessarily give rise to beliefs. As I mentioned, the feeling is not lessen even if you refuse to believe, as you should, that this person is actually familiar to you.
(The face is a composite of Bush and Obama. It is chosen to illustrate that the feeling of familiarity is not a consequence of how familiar things actually are; instead it may be a consequnece of the degree of fluency with which unconscious processes can identify perceived items (Whittlesea, 1993; Whittlesea & Williams, 1998). Learning a grammar can also generate feelings of familiarity. Subjects who have implicitly learned an artificial grammar report feelings of familiarity when they encounter novel stimuli that are part of the learnt grammar (Scott & Dienes, 2008). They are also not doomed to treat feelings of familiarity as being about actual familiarity: instead subjects can use feeling of familiarity in deciding whether a stimulus is from that grammar (Wan, Dienes, & Fu, 2008).)
I could go on to mention the feeling you have when someone’s eyes are boring into your back, or the feeling that a name is on the tip of your tongue. But let me focus just on the feelings associated with electricity and with familiarity. These feelings are paradigm cases of metacognitive feeling.
What is a metacognitive feeling? I think it’s a sensation. To illustrate,
contrast two sensory encounters with this wire. In the first you visually experience the wire as having a certain shape. In the second you receive an electric shock from the wire without seeing or touching it.% \footnote{This illustration is borrowed from Campbell (2002: 133–4); I use it to support a claim weaker than his.} The first sensory encounter involves perceptual experience as of a property of the wire whereas, intuitively, the second does not. I take this intuition to be correct.% \footnote{ Notice that the intuition is not that the shock involves no perceptual experience at all, only that the shock does not involve perceptual experience as of any property of the wire. Notice also that the intuition concerns what a perceptual experience is as of, and not directly what is represented in perception. The relation between these two is arguably not straightforward (compare, e.g., Shoemaker (1994, p. 28) or Chalmers (2006, pp. 50--2) on distinguishing representational from phenomenal content). }
The intuition is potentially revealing because the electric shock involves rich phenomenology, and its particular phenomenal character depends in part on properties of its cause (changes in the strength of the electric current would have resulted in an encounter with different phenomenal character). So there are sensory encounters which, despite having phenomenal characters that depend in part on which properties are encountered, are not perceptual experiences as of those properties.
Let me give you two more illustrations [bushObama and Wynn’s magic mice]. ...
All three examples (the feelings of magic, of electricity and of familiarity) show that:

Metacognitive feelings

There are aspects of the overall phenomenal character of experiences which their subjects take to be informative about things that are only distantly related (if at all) to the things that those experiences intentionally relate the subject to.

To illustrate, having a feeling of familiarity is not a matter of standing in any intentional relation to the property of familiarity, but it is something that we can interpret as informative about famility.
Metacognitive feelings are these aspects of experience.
Why accept this? You cannot perceive familiarity or agency any more than you can perceive electricity. Perceptual processes do not reach far back into your past, nor are they concerned with questions about whether you are the agent of an action. So to think that metacognitive feelings intentionally relate you to facts about familiarity or agency requires postulating a novel kind of sensory process, some kind of inner or bodily sense. While justification for postulating a novel inner sense may ultimately be discovered, I don’t think there is currently anything to justify this.
[EITHER] To see why we are not justified in postulating a novel inner sense, it is worth recalling Reid’s theory of sensations. [OR] But this is right, why do metacognitive feelings invite judgements? Why does the feeling of familiarity even so much as nudge you to judge that the face photographed here is familiar to you? (This is roughly Dokic (2012)’s question.)
[Key point to stress there is just that metacognitive feelings are not intentional states, they are not representations, they have no content. [Or if they do have content, it’s not related to the things we take them to be associated with, like familiarity or electricity.] They are blank sensations. Compare the sensation associated with an electrical shock. It’s not a perception of electricity.]

Metacognitive feelings

can be thought of as

sensations.

metacognitive feelings can be thought of as sensations in approximately Reid’s sense.% \footnote{ Reid (1785); Reid (1785a). Even if you don’t believe that there are sensations in Reid’s sense, thinking of metacognitive feelings as if they were sensations will serve to illustrate their characteristic features. The main points that follow are consistent with several different ways of thinking about metacognitive feelings. For instance, you might take the view that what I am calling metacognitive feelings are perceptual experiences of the body or of bodily reactions, or that they involve some kind of cognitive phenomenology. The essential claim is just that the metacognitive feelings associated with the operations of object indexes are not constituted by states which involve intentional relations to any of the things which are assigned an object index. }

Sensations are

  1. monadic properties of perceptual experiences
  2. individuated by their normal causes
  3. (so they do not involve an intentional relation)
  4. which alter the overall phenomenal character of those experiences
  5. in ways not determined by the experiences’ contents.
Sensations are: #. monadic properties of events, specifically perceptual experiences, #. individuated by their normal causes% %{Tye, 1984 #1744@204} ---in the case of feelings of familiarity, its normal cause is ease of processing #. which alter the overall phenomenal character of those experiences #. in ways not determined by the experiences’ contents (so two perceptual experiences can have the same content while one has a sensational property which the other lacks).

metacognitive feelings trigger beliefs only via associations.

An important consequence is that metacognitive feelings can lead to beliefs only via associations or further beliefs. They are signs which need to be interpreted by their subjects (Reid, 1785b, p. Essay~II, Chap. 16, 228 Reid, 1785a, p. Chap. VI sect. III, pp. 164–5). Let me explain.
As a scientist, you can pick out the feeling of familiarity as that metacognitive feeling which is normally caused by the degree to which certain processes are fluent. But as the subject of who has that metacognitive feeling, you do not necessarily know what its typical causes are. This is something you have to work out in whatever ways you work out the causes of any other type of event.
(Contrast metacognitive feelings with perceptual experiences. Having a perceptual experience of, say, a wire’s shape, involves standing in an intentional relation to the wire’s shape; and the phenomenal character of this perceptual experience is specified by this intentional relation.% \footnote{ Compare Martin (2002, p. 380): ‘I attend to what it is like for me to inspect the lavender bush through perceptually attending to the bush itself.’ And Byrne (2001, p. 211) ‘subject can only discover the phenomenal character of her experience by attending to the world ... as her experience represents it.’ } Such perceptual experiences are often held to reveal the wire’s shape to the subject and so lead directly to beliefs.% \footnote{ Compare Johnston (1992, p. 222): ‘[j]ustified belief … is available simply on the basis of visual perception’; Tye (1995, pp. 143–144): ‘Phenomenal character “stands ready … to make a direct impact on beliefs’; and Smith (2001, p. 291): ‘[p]erceptual experiences are … intrinsically … belief-inducing.’ })
(By contrast, having a metacognitive feeling concerning familiarity or an physical object’s path does not involve standing in any intentional relation to these things. The metacognitive feeling is individuated by its normal causes, rather than by any intentional relation. And a metacognitive feeling leads to belief, if at all, only indirectly. For learning is required in order for the subject to come to a view on what tends to cause the metacognitive feeling.)
metacognitive feelings have been quite widely neglected in philosophy and developmental psychology. They are a means by which cognitive processes enable perceivers to acquire dispositions to form beliefs about objects’ properties which are reliably true. metacognitive feelings provide a low-cost but efficient bridge between non-conscious cognitive processes and conscious reasoning.
This, anyway, is why I think that

metacognitive feelings

Thereare aspects of the overall phenomenal character of experiences which their subjects take to be informative about things that are only distantly related (if at all) to the things that those experiences intentionally relate the subject to.

Wynn 1992, fig 1 (part)

What is a metacognitive feeling? Consider a third (and final) illustration.
Recall this situation. Suppose you have seen it a hundred times before, so you know just what to expect. Still, the tendancy to expect two objects is on some level barely diminished, and event in which a single object is revealled is liable to feel magical in some small way. This feeling of magic is a metacognitive feeling.

feeling of surprise

There is a feeling of surprise which has features characteristic metacognitive feelings.

‘the intensity of felt surprise is [...] influenced by [...]
the degree of the event’s interference with ongoing mental activity’

Reisenzein et al, 2000 p. 271; cf. Touroutoglou & Efklides, 2010

In particular,
‘the intensity of felt surprise is not only influenced by the unexpectedness of the surprising event, but also by the degree of the event’s interference with ongoing mental activity, [...] the effect of unexpectedness on surprise is [...] partly mediated by mental interference’ (Reisenzein, 2000, p. 271)
That is, the feeling of surprise is a sensational consequence of mental interference. (This can be tested by increasing cognitive load: this intensifies feelings of surprise without, of course, making the events themselves more suprirsing. But see (Reisenzein, Horstmann, & Schützwohl, 2017) for an alternative interpretation of such findings.)
So whereas the feelings of agency and familiarity are both consequences of unexpected fluency of processing, the feeling of surprise is supposed to be the opposite: it is a consequence of unexpected interference in processes.
\footnote{ % An alterantive is proposed by Foster & Keane (2015, p. 79): ‘the MEB theory of surprise posits that: Experienced surprise is a metacognitive assessment of the cognitive work carried out to explain an outcome. Very surprising events are those that are difficult to explain, while less surprising events are those which are easier to explain.’ Foster & Keane (2015) is about reactions to reading about something unexpected, whereas Reisenzein (2000) measures how people experience unexpected events (changes to stimuli while solving a problem). The latter is much closer to what I’m after. }

object index operations

? ? ? metacognitive feelings

patterns in looking durations

So my question was how the operations of object indexes might explain patterns of looking duration in habituation and violation-of-expectation experiments.
My guess is that some operations of object indexes give rise to metacognitive feelings, which in turn influence looking durations.

Objection

If object index operations produce metacognitive feelings,

wouldn’t these generate knowledge about object locations?

(And so generate the incorrect predictions that flow from ascribing knowledge of object locations?)

Reply: (a) metacognitive feelings are of surprise, not of particular locations. The feelings do not specify anything about what caused them; (b) in any case, the feelings do not necessarily trigger beliefs at all ...
You can choose to interpret the feeling differently. You are not presented with familiarity in the way that you are presented with, say, circularity.

object index operations

? ? ? metacognitive feelings

patterns in looking durations

So my question was how the operations of object indexes might explain patterns of looking duration in habituation and violation-of-expectation experiments.
My guess is that some operations of object indexes give rise to metacognitive feelings, which in turn influence looking durations.