Gabriel Vogel final seminar.

Opponent: Linnea Karlsson Wirebring, Umeå University

Abstract:

What do we know of the reasons behind our choices? What neurocognitive mechanisms subserve our introspective reports? The goal of this thesis is to advance our understanding of introspection by studying when it fails, without us being aware of it. To do so, we used the choice blindness paradigm. Choice blindness is a surprising phenomenon in which people fail to detect mismatch between their intention and outcome and spontaneously confabulate reasons why they chose things they never chose. Very little is known about the neurocognitive underpinnings of choice blindness, including the detection of manipulation, confabulation, and preference change. Our contribution consists in making this phenomenon less puzzling, by dissecting its neurocognitive basis. This involved building a first framework of false feedback detection in choice blindness, investigating the monitoring mechanisms and reasoning processes allowing us to keep track of our intentions and consequences in the world (sense of agency), which typically fail in choice blindness. In addition, by studying how our brain spontaneously integrate false information about one’s choice through confabulation and post hoc rationalization, we underlie the deeply interpretative nature of introspection and self-knowledge (which has often escaped our intuitive understanding of ourselves). We also review the state of the art on interpretative models of introspection, highlight gaps in the literature, and formulate new research tracks.