In recent years, we have developed a psychophysical paradigm to experimentally investigate confusions between imagination and perception in healthy participants. In our paradigm, participants simultaneously imagine and detect simple gratings 2/10
Compared to no imagery or incongruent imagery, congruent imagery consistently leads to an increase in presence responses, even in absent trials, suggesting participants sometimes confused imagery for perception. This effect is captured by a decrease in criterion/offset: 3/10
In daily life there are cases where even though imagination is experienced as real, people still have metacognitive insight: they know it’s not real. This happens for example during lucid dreaming or hallucinations with insight 4/10
In this study, we tested whether our healthy participants had metacognitive insight into mistaking imagery for perception by asking how imagery influenced how confident they were in perceptual detection responses 5/10
We extended @smfleming.bsky.social's HMeta-d’ model to be able to model how confidence ratings would change if participants did or did not have insight into the influence of imagery on perception 6/10 https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix007/3748261
In the case of no insight during imagery, confidence criteria should move in tandem with decision criteria, leading to confident presence responses. In contrast, insight should lead to independent confidence criteria setting, leading to low confidence in presence responses: 7/10
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https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix007/3748261