Lau, H.
Columbia University, New York, USA
Metacognitive reports of perception (such as visibility judgments or confidence ratings) are reflected by activity in the prefrontal cortex. Critics of prefrontal theories of consciousness argue that such findings are specific to metacognition, and are irrelevant to the primary aspects of sensory awareness. Here I argue that these metacognitive reports can capture some of our deepest intuitions regarding sensory awareness. Our experiments using psychophysics and brain imaging showed that under the lack of attention, metacognitive judgments were inflated, such that subjects rated their subjective sense of perception to be higher than was warranted by the underlying processing capacity. This explains why we may subjectivily feel that we see vividly the whole visual scene in front of it, even though inattentional blindness and change blindness studies showed that we are only good at processing a few items at a time, and that peripheral vision has relatively poor color sensitivity and spatial resolution. The explanation is that we do not actually see all the items in front of us in colorful details. We only think/judge that we are seeing them because of a biased metacognitive mechanism. Whereas philosopher Ned Block argues that visual phenomenology may be too rich to be captured by self-reports, our findings suggest that self-reports can shed important light on the issue, if we use the right kind of measure - metacognitive reports instead of forced-choice task performance.