無證據支持跨領域下對無意識刺激的後設認知

Abstract

決策過程本質上涉及一定程度的不確定性，而監控這種不確定性的能力——即後設認知（metacognition）——對於調整和控制我們的認知過程至關重要。傳統上，準確的後設認知被認為依賴於有意識的覺察。然而，一些研究表明，後設認知可以在沒有對刺激的有意識覺察的情況下發生。值得注意的是，這些發現主要局限於視覺領域，因此尚不清楚類似的現象是否存在於其他領域，例如聽覺或記憶領域。此外，雖然在感官模態之間（如視覺和聽覺）的後設認知效率存在相關性，但在感官知覺和識別記憶之間卻沒有這樣的相關性。在無意識條件下，這些關係是否持續仍然未知。為了解決這些研究空白，參與者被要求判斷被遮蔽、閾值水平的刺激位置（在視覺和聽覺任務中）或識別狀態（在視覺-識別記憶任務中），並對其判斷的信心水平進行評估。本研究旨在：(i) 重現以往在視覺任務中無意識後設認知的發現，(ii) 檢驗這種現象是否延伸至聽覺和視覺-識別記憶領域，及 (iii) 探索無意識條件下後設認知的跨領域相關性。儘管試圖近似之前的方法，結果顯示在視覺任務中沒有發現無意識後設認知的證據。同樣，在聽覺或視覺-識別記憶任務中也未觀察到這種後設認知。這些結果突顯了以往研究報告的不一致性，並表明無意識後設認知可能並非在單一實驗範式內穩定可重現的現象。

Decision-making inherently involves some degree of uncertainty, and the ability to monitor this uncertainty—known as metacognition—is critical for adjusting and controlling our cognitive processes. Accurate metacognition is traditionally thought to rely on conscious awareness. However, some studies suggest that metacognition can occur without conscious awareness of stimuli. Notably, these findings are primarily limited to the visual domain, leaving it unclear whether similar phenomena exist in other domains, such as auditory or memory domain. Furthermore, while correlations in metacognitive efficiency have been observed between sensory modalities (e.g., vision and audition), no such correlation exists between sensory perception and recognition memory. Whether such relationships persist under unconscious conditions remains unknown. To address these gaps, participants judged either the location (in visual and auditory tasks) or the recognition status (in the visual-recognition memory task) of masked, threshold-level stimuli and rated their confidence of their judgments. The study aimed to (i) reproduce previous findings of metacognition without awareness in visual tasks, (ii) examine whether this phenomenon extends to auditory and visual-recognition memory domains, and (iii) explore cross-domain correlations in metacognition under unconscious conditions. Despite attempting to approximate previous methodologies, results revealed no evidence of metacognition without awareness in the visual task. Similarly, no such metacognition was observed in auditory or visual-recognition memory tasks. These findings highlight inconsistencies in previous reports and suggest that metacognition without awareness may not be robustly reproducible, even within a single experimental paradigm.