Being able to accumulate accurate information about one’s own performance is important in everyday contexts, and arguably particularly so in complex multitasking contexts. Thus, the observation of a glaring gap in participants’ introspection regarding their own reaction time costs in a concurrent dual-task context is deserving of closer examination. This so-called introspective blind spot has been explained by a ‘consciousness bottleneck’ which states that while attention is occupied by one task, participants cannot consciously perceive another stimulus presented in that time. In the current study, a series of introspective Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) experiments were conducted to identify the determinants of an introspective blind spot; to our surprise, in half of the experiments participants appeared to be aware of their dual-task costs. A single trial analysis highlighted the sensory modality of the two stimuli within the trial as an important predictor of introspective accuracy, along with temporal gaps in the trial. The current findings call into question the claim that attention is required for conscious awareness. We propose a memory-based account of introspective processes in this context, whereby introspective accuracy is determined by the memory systems involved in encoding and rehearsing memory traces. This model of the conditions required to build up accurate representations of our performance may have far-reaching consequences for monitoring and introspection across a range of tasks.

能够积累有关自己表现的准确信息在日常环境中非常重要，可以说在复杂的多任务环境中尤其如此。因此，在并发双任务环境中，参与者对自己的反应时间成本的内省中观察到的明显差距值得更仔细的检查。这种所谓的内省盲点可以用“意识瓶颈”来解释，即当注意力被一项任务占据时，参与者无法有意识地感知当时出现的另一种刺激。在当前的研究中，进行了一系列内省心理不应期（PRP）实验，以确定内省盲点的决定因素；令我们惊讶的是，在一半的实验中，参与者似乎意识到了他们的双重任务成本。一项试验分析强调了试验中两种刺激的感觉方式以及试验中的时间间隙是内省准确性的重要预测因素。目前的研究结果对有意识意识需要注意力的说法提出了质疑。我们提出了一种基于记忆的内省过程解释，其中内省的准确性是由参与编码和排练记忆痕迹的记忆系统决定的。这种建立准确表示我们绩效所需的条件模型可能会对一系列任务的监控和内省产生深远的影响。