Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Nov 15;2019(1):niz015.
doi: 10.1093/nc/niz015. eCollection 2019.

Deflating inflation: the connection (or lack thereof) between decisional and metacognitive processes and visual phenomenology

Greyson Abid  1
Affiliations

Deflating inflation: the connection (or lack thereof) between decisional and metacognitive processes and visual phenomenology

Greyson Abid. Neurosci Conscious. .

Abstract

Vision presents us with a richly detailed world. Yet, there is a range of limitations in the processing of visual information, such as poor peripheral resolution and failures to notice things we do not attend. This raises a natural question: How do we seem to see so much when there is considerable evidence indicating otherwise? In an elegant series of studies, Lau and colleagues have offered a novel answer to this long-standing question, proposing that our sense of visual richness is an artifact of decisional and metacognitive deficits. I critically evaluate this proposal and conclude that it rests on questionable presuppositions concerning the relationship between decisional and metacognitive processes, on one hand, and visual phenomenology, on the other.

Keywords: consciousness; metacognition; richness of visual experience; subjective inflation.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The Kanizsa Triangle. The triangle in the foreground is modally completed. The triangle in the background is amodally completed
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
An ordinary triangle
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Anstis S. Picturing perceptual acuity. Perception 1998;27:817–25. - PubMed
    1. Block N. Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience. Behav Brain Sci 2007;30:481–99. - PubMed
    1. Block N. Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access. Trends Cogn Sci 2011;12:567–75. - PubMed
    1. Block N. Rich conscious attention outside focal attention. Trends Cogn Sci 2014;18:445–57. - PubMed
    1. Block N. Empirical science meets higher-order views of consciousness: reply to Hakwan Lau and Richard Brown In: Pautz A, Stoljar D (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019, 199–213.