Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Questienne, Laurence
• van Dijck, Jean-Philippe
• Gevers, Wim
• Gauthier, Isabel

Titel

Introspection of Subjective Feelings Is Sensitive and Specific

Ist Teil von

• Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2018-02, Vol.44 (2), p.215-225

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Psychological Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Conversely to behaviorist ideas, recent studies suggest that introspection can be accurate and reliable. However, an unresolved question is whether people are able to report specific aspects of their phenomenal experience, or whether they report more general nonspecific experiences. To address this question, we investigated the sensitivity and validity of our introspection for different types of conflict. Taking advantage of the congruency sequence effect, we dissociated response conflict while keeping visual conflict unchanged in a Stroop and in a priming task. Participants were subsequently asked to report on either their experience of urge to err or on their feeling of visual conflict. Depending on the focus of the introspection, subjective reports specifically followed either the response conflict or the visual conflict. These results demonstrate that our introspective reports can be sensitive and that we are able to dissociate specific aspects of our phenomenal experiences in a valid manner. Public Significance Statement Introspection refers to our ability to examine and report on our own conscious thoughts and feelings. Introspective reports have often been considered as unreliable. Based on the current results we argue instead that our introspective reports are sensitive to small variations in performance (even a few milliseconds are sufficient to be noticed and reported) and can be specifically tuned to different aspects of our performance. Furthermore, our introspections are valid in the sense that we are able to reliably introspect on the dimension targeted by the question. Besides this central aim, we additionally report a new and intriguing finding. Information can be presented so briefly that it becomes very difficult to detect it. When such briefly presented information conflicts with our task, this results in enhanced visual processing on the following trial.