I’m co-author on a new paper in Psychological Science – a collaboration between the Sackler Centre (me and Adam Barrett) and the University of Amsterdam (where I am a Visiting Professor).  The new study addresses the continuing debate about whether the apparent rich content of our visual sensory scenes is somehow an illusion, as suggested by experiments like change blindness.  Here, we provide evidence in the opposite direction by showing that metacognition (literally, cognition about cognition) is equivalent for different kinds of visual memory, including visual ‘sensory’ memory which reflects brief, unattended, stimuli.  The results indicate that our subjective impression of seeing more than we can attend to is not an illusion, but is an accurate reflection of the richness of visual perception.

Accurate Metacognition for Visual Sensory Memory Representations.

The capacity to attend to multiple objects in the visual field is limited. However, introspectively, people feel that they see the whole visual world at once. Some scholars suggest that this introspective feeling is based on short-lived sensory memory representations, whereas others argue that the feeling of seeing more than can be attended to is illusory. Here, we investigated this phenomenon by combining objective memory performance with subjective confidence ratings during a change-detection task. This allowed us to compute a measure of metacognition-the degree of knowledge that subjects have about the correctness of their decisions-for different stages of memory. We show that subjects store more objects in sensory memory than they can attend to but, at the same time, have similar metacognition for sensory memory and working memory representations. This suggests that these subjective impressions are not an illusion but accurate reflections of the richness of visual perception.