November 2nd, 2013
Hakwan Lau, Ph.D.
Columbia University
Sensory Metacognition & Conscious Awareness
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. I argue 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 we use heuristical strategies to determine perceptual confidence.