Sensory Metacognition & Conscious Awareness
Saturday, November 2, 2013
10:00 am
"Sensory Metacognition & Conscious Awareness" with Hakwan Lau, Ph.D.

Discussant: Mark Solms, Ph.D.

Metacognition is the ability to monitor the effectiveness of ongoing cognitive processes. This can be indexed by one's ability to place confidence ratings to indicate the likelihood of correct responses in a task. Dr. Lau argues that 1) metacognition may reflect the subjective experience in visual perception; 2) the neural mechanisms for visual and memory metacognition may be different, which means there may not be a single, domain-general self-monitoring system; 3) human metacognition is likely suboptimal from a strictly computational standpoint, and instead heuristical strategies are used to determine perceptual confidence.