Metacognitive Feelings Connect Object Indexes to Looking Behaviours
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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]. ...
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.
You can choose to interpret the feeling differently.
You are not presented with familiarity in the way that you are presented with, say,
circularity.