Detection failures in perceptual tasks can result from different causes: sometimes we may fail to see something because perceptual information is noisy or degraded, and sometimes we may fail to see something due to the limited capacity of attention. Previous work indicates that metacognitive capacities for detection failures may differ depending on the specific stimulus visibility manipulation employed. In this investigation, we measured metacognition while matching performance in two visibility manipulations: phase-scrambling and the attentional blink. As in previous work, metacognitive asymmetries emerged: despite matched type 1 performance, metacognitive ability (measured by area under the ROC curve) for reporting stimulus absence was higher in the attentional blink condition, which was mainly driven by metacognitive ability in correct rejection trials. We performed Signal Detection Theoretic (SDT) modeling of the results, showing that differences in metacognition under equal type I performance can be explained when the variance of the signal and noise distributions are unequal. Specifically, the present study suggests that phase scrambling signal trials have a wider distribution (more variability) than attentional blink signal trials, leading to a larger area under the ROC curve for attentional blink trials where subjects reported stimulus absence. These results provide a theoretical basis for the origin of metacognitive differences on trials where subjects report stimulus absence, and may also explain previous findings where the absence of evidence during detection tasks results in lower metacognitive performance when compared to categorization.

感知任务中的检测失败可能是由不同原因引起的：有时由于感知信息嘈杂或降级，我们可能看不到某些东西；有时由于注意力有限，我们可能看不到某些东西。先前的工作表明，针对检测失败的元认知能力可能会有所不同，具体取决于所采用的特定刺激可见性操作。在这项调查中，我们测量了元认知，同时在两种可见性操作中匹配了性能：相位加扰和注意眨眼。和以前的工作一样，出现了元认知不对称现象：尽管1型表现相匹配，但在注意眨眼情况下，报告缺少刺激的元认知能力（以ROC曲线下的面积衡量）更高，这主要是由正确的排斥试验中的元认知能力驱动的。我们对结果进行了信号检测理论（SDT）建模，表明当信号和噪声分布的方差不相等时，在相同I类性能下的元认知差异可以得到解释。具体而言，本研究表明，相位加扰信号试验比注意眨眼信号试验具有更广泛的分布（更大的可变性），导致注意眨眼试验的ROC曲线下面积更大，受试者报告没有刺激。这些结果为在受试者报告缺乏刺激的试验中元认知差异的起源提供了理论基础，