Browsing by Author "Reyes, Gabriel"
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Item Biological Stress Reactivity and Introspective Sensitivity: An Exploratory Study(2020) Barrientos, Mauricio; Tapia, Leonel; Silva, Jaime R.; Reyes, GabrielReaction to stressful events has an impact on several cognitive processes. High levels of stress can be detrimental to working memory, attention and decision-making. Here, we investigated whether individuals’ reactivity to stress is related to their introspective sensitivity (i.e., how well individuals monitor their own cognitive processes). To this aim, 27 participants (16 women, mean 20 years old) were exposed to a psychosocial stress protocol (trier social stress test, TSST), where individuals were asked to simulate a job interview and perform arithmetic calculations in front of a panel of experts. The salivary cortisol concentration, which is considered a hormonal index of stress reactivity, was collected during the TSST through the enzyme immunoassay DRG cortisol ELISA kit. Based on literature recommendations, we classified participants as responders and non-responders to the TSST. In a second session, through a visual search paradigm, we evaluated the introspective sensitivity of the participants. We evaluated how these individuals (i) monitor their own performance (through a confidence estimation), (ii) monitor their own attentional shifts (through a subjective number of scanned items estimation, SNSI), and (iii) monitor their own response times (through an introspective response time estimation, iRT). We found that individuals with lower biological reactivity to stress are more accurate in estimating their SNSI (p = 0.033) and iRT (p = 0.002), and in evaluating their own performance (p = 0.038) through their confidence. We argue that the effect of stress on introspection is not limited to a particular type of introspective evaluation, but rather consists of a general alteration of the introspective mechanism.Item Consensus goals for the field of visual metacognition(2021) Rahnev, Dobromir; Balsdon, Tarryn; Charles, Lucie; De Gardelle, Vincent; Denison, Rachel; Desender, Kobe; Faivre, Nathan; Filevich, Elisa; Fleming, Stephen; Jehee, Janneke; Lau, Hakwan; Lee, Alan; Locke, Shannon; Mamassian, Pascal; Odegaard, Brian; Peters, Megan; Reyes, Gabriel; Rouault, Marion; Sackur, Jérôme; Samaha, Jason; Sergent, Claire; Sherman, Maxine Tamara; Siedlecka, Marta; Soto, David; Vlassova, Alexandra; Zylberberg, ArielDespite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term common goals. We describe the process that we followed, the goals themselves, and our plans for accomplishing these goals. If this effort proves successful within the next few years, such consensus-building around common goals could be adopted more widely in psychological science.Item Corrigendum: Biological Stress Reactivity and Introspective Sensitivity: An Exploratory Study(2020) Barrientos, Mauricio; Tapia, Leonel; Silva, Jaime R.; Reyes, GabrielIn the published article, there was an error in affiliationItem Hydrocortisone decreases metacognitive efciency independent of perceived stress(2020) Reyes, Gabriel; Vivanco-Carlevari, Anastassia; Medina, Franco; Manosalva, Carolina; Gardelle, Vincent de; Silva, Jaime R.; Sackur, JérômeIt is well established that acute stress produces negative effects on high level cognitive functions. However, these effects could be due to the physiological components of the stress response (among which cortisol secretion is prominent), to its psychological concomitants (the thoughts generated by the stressor) or to any combination of those. Our study shows for the first time that the typical cortisol response to stress is sufficient to impair metacognition, that is the ability to monitor one’s own performance in a task. In a pharmacological protocol, we administered either 20 mg hydrocortisone or placebo to 46 male participants, and measured their subjective perception of stress, their performance in a perceptual task, and their metacognitive ability. We found that hydrocortisone selectively impaired metacognitive ability, without affecting task performance or creating a subjective state of stress. In other words, the single physiological response of stress produces a net effect on metacognition. These results inform our basic understanding of the physiological bases of metacognition. They are also relevant for applied or clinical research about situations involving stress, anxiety, depression, or simply cortisol use.Item Introspection during short-term memory scanning(2018) Reyes, Gabriel; Sackur, JérômeThe literature in metacognition has argued for many years that introspective access to our own mental content is restricted to the cognitive states associated with the response to a task, such as the level of confidence in a decision or the estimation of the response time; however, the cognitive processes that underlie such states were deemed inaccessible to participants’ consciousness. Here, we ask whether participants could introspectively distinguish the cognitive processes that underlie two short-term memory tasks. For this purpose, we asked participants, on a trial-by-trial basis, to report the number of items that they mentally scanned during their short-term memory retrieval, which we have named “subjective number of scanned items.” The subjective number of scanned items index was evaluated, in Experiment 1, immediately after a judgment of recency task and, in Experiment 2, after an item recognition task. Finally, in Experiment 3, both tasks were randomly mixed. The results showed that participants’ introspection successfully accessed the complexity of the decisional processes.Item Introspective access to implicit shifts of attention(01/02/2017) Reyes, Gabriel; Sackur, JérômeLiterature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access to complex cognitive processes. This situation derives from the difficulty of experimentally manipulating cognitive processes while abiding by the two contradictory constraints. First, participants must not be aware of the experimental manipulation, otherwise they run the risk of incorporating their knowledge of the experimental manipulation in some rational elaboration. Second, we need an external, third person perspective evidence that the experimental manipulation did impact some relevant cognitive processes. Here, we study introspection during visual searches, and we try to overcome the above dilemma, by presenting a barely visible, “pre-conscious” cue just before the search array. We aim at influencing the attentional guidance of the search processes, while participants would not notice that fact. Results show that introspection of the complexity of a search process is driven in part by subjective access to its attentional guidance.Item Listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature(2021) Goupi, Louise; Ponsot, Emmanuel; Richardson, Daniel; Reyes, Gabriel; Aucouturier, Jean-JulienThe success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability during linguistic interactions.Item Meditation focused on self-observation of the body impairs metacognitive efficiency(2019) Schmidt, Carlos; Reyes, Gabriel; Barrientos, Mauricio; Langer, Álvaro I.; Sackur, JérômeIn the last decade of research on metacognition, the literature has been focused on understanding its mechanism, function and scope; however, little is known about whether metacognitive capacity can be trained. The specificity of the potential training procedure is in particular still largely unknown. In this study, we evaluate whether metacognition is trainable through generic meditation training, and if so, which component of meditation would be instrumental in this improvement. To this end, we evaluated participants’ metacognitive efficiency before and after two types of meditation training protocols: the first focused on mental cues (Mental Monitoring [MM] training), whereas the second focused on body cues (Self-observation of the Body [SoB] training). Results indicated that while metacognitive efficiency was stable in MM training group, it was significantly reduced in the SoB group after training. This suggests that metacognition should not be conceived as a stable capacity but rather as a malleable skill.Item Metacognitive Improvement: Disentangling Adaptive Training From Experimental Confounds(2021) Rouy, Martin; de Gardelle, Vincent; Sackur, Jérôme; Vergnaud, Jean Christophe; Filevich, Elisa; Faivre, Nathan; Reyes, GabrielMetacognition is defined as the capacity to monitor and control one’s own cognitive processes. Recently, Carpenter and colleagues (2019) reported that metacognitive performance can be improved through adaptive training: healthy participants performed a perceptual discrimination task, and subsequently indicated confidence in their response. Metacognitive performance, defined as how much information these confidence judgments contain about the accuracy of perceptual decisions, was found to increase in a group of participants receiving monetary reward based on their confidence judgments over hundreds of trials and multiple sessions. By contrast, in a control group where only perceptual performance was incentivized, metacognitive performance remained constant across experimental sessions. We identified two possible confounds that may have led to an artificial increase in metacognitive performance, namely the absence of reward in the initial session and an inconsistency between the reward scheme and the instructions about the confidence scale. We thus conducted a preregistered conceptual replication where all sessions were rewarded and where instructions were consistent with the reward scheme. Critically, once these two confounds were corrected we found moderate evidence for an absence of metacognitive training. Our data thus suggest that previous claims about metacognitive training are premature, and calls for more research on how to train individuals to monitor their own performance.Item Self-Knowledge Dim-Out: Stress Impairs Metacognitive Accuracy(2015) Reyes, Gabriel; Silva, Jaime R.; Jaramillo, Karina; Rehbein, Lucio; Sackur, JérômeModulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response impacts cognitive and emotional functioning. Here, we investigate the effects of stress on metacognition, which is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognition. As the frontal lobes have been shown to play a critical role in metacognition, we predicted that under activation of the HPA axis, participants should be less accurate in the assessment of their own performances in a perceptual decision task, irrespective of the effect of stress on the first order perceptual decision itself. To test this prediction, we constituted three groups of high, medium and low stress responders based on cortisol concentration in saliva in response to a standardized psycho-social stress challenge (the Trier Social Stress Test). We then assessed the accuracy of participants' confidence judgments in a visual discrimination task. As predicted, we found that high biological reactivity to stress correlates with lower sensitivity in metacognition. In sum, participants under stress know less when they know and when theyItem Students With High Metacognition Are Favourable Towards Individualism When Anxious(2022) Barrientos, Mauricio S.; Valenzuela Ramírez, Pilar; Reyes, Gabriel; Hojman, VivianaMetacognitive ability has been described as an important predictor of several processes involved in learning, including problem-solving. Although this relationship is fairly documented, little is known about the mechanisms that could modulate it. Given its relationship with both constructs, we decided to evaluate the impact of self-knowledge on PS. In addition, we inspected whether emotional (self-reported anxiety) and interpersonal (attitudes towards social interdependence) variables could affect the relationship between metacognition and problem-solving. We tested a sample of 32 undergraduate students and used behavioural tasks and self-report questionnaires. Contrary to the literature, we found no significant relationship between metacognition and problem-solving performance, nor a significant moderating effect when including emotional and interpersonal variables in the model. In contrast, we observed a significant moderating model combining metacognition, self-reported anxiety and attitudes towards social interdependence. It was found that participants with high metacognition reported attitudes unfavourable towards interdependence when they felt high anxiety. These results suggest that already anxious individuals with high metacognition would prefer to work alone rather than with others, as a coping mechanism against further anxiety derived from cooperation. We hypothesise that in anxiogenic contexts, metacognition is used as a tool to compare possible threats with one’s own skills and act accordingly, in order to maximise one’s own performance. Further studies are needed to understand how metacognition works in contexts adverse to learning.Item Students With High Metacognition Are Favourable Towards Individualism When Anxious(2022) Barrientos, Mauricio S.; Valenzuela, Pilar; Hojman, Viviana; Reyes, GabrielMetacognitive ability has been described as an important predictor of several processes involved in learning, including problem-solving. Although this relationship is fairly documented, little is known about the mechanisms that could modulate it. Given its relationship with both constructs, we decided to evaluate the impact of self-knowledge on PS. In addition, we inspected whether emotional (self-reported anxiety) and interpersonal (attitudes towards social interdependence) variables could affect the relationship between metacognition and problem-solving. We tested a sample of 32 undergraduate students and used behavioural tasks and self-report questionnaires. Contrary to the literature, we found no significant relationship between metacognition and problem-solving performance, nor a significant moderating effect when including emotional and interpersonal variables in the model. In contrast, we observed a significant moderating model combining metacognition, self-reported anxiety and attitudes towards social interdependence. It was found that participants with high metacognition reported attitudes unfavourable towards interdependence when they felt high anxiety. These results suggest that already anxious individuals with high metacognition would prefer to work alone rather than with others, as a coping mechanism against further anxiety derived from cooperation. We hypothesise that in anxiogenic contexts, metacognition is used as a tool to compare possible threats with one’s own skills and act accordingly, in order to maximise one’s own performance. Further studies are needed to understand how metacognition works in contexts adverse to learning.Item The Confidence Database(2020) Rahnev, Dobromir; Desender, Kobe; Lee, Alan L. F.; Adler, William T.; Aguilar-Lleyda, David; Akdoğan, Başak; Arbuzova, Polina; Atlas, Lauren Y.; Balcı, Fuat; Bègue, Indrit; Birney, Damian P.; Brady, Timothy F.; Calder-Travis, Joshua; Chetverikov, Andrey; Clark, Torin K.; Davranche, Karen; Denison, Rachel N.; Double, Kit S.; Bang, Won Ji; Duyan, Yalçın A.; Faivre, Nathan; Fallow, Kaitlyn; Filevich, Elisa; Gajdos, Thibault; Gallagher, Regan M.; Gardelle, Vincent de; Gherman, Sabina; Haddara, Nadia; Hainguerlot, Marine; Hsu, Tzu-Yu; Hu, Xiao; Iturrate, Iñaki; Jaquiery, Matt; Kantner, Justin; Koculak, Marcin; Konishi, Mahiko; Koß, Christina; Kvam, Peter D.; Kwok, Sze Chai; Lebreton, Maël; Reyes, GabrielUnderstanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations, and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analyzed in multiple software packages. Each dataset is further accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (available at osf.io/s46pr) contained 145 datasets with data from over 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. We show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimation for several foundational confidence-related effects.