Representing the absence of objects is psychologically demanding. People are slower, less confident and show lower metacognitive sensitivity (the alignment between subjective confidence and objective accuracy) when reporting the absence compared with presence of visual stimuli. However, what counts as a stimulus absence remains only loosely defined. In this Registered Report, we ask whether such processing asymmetries extend beyond the absence of whole objects to absences defined by stimulus features or expectation violations. Our pre-registered prediction was that differences in the processing of presence and absence reflect a default mode of reasoning: we assume an absence unless evidence is available to the contrary. We predicted asymmetries in response time, confidence, and metacognitive sensitivity in discriminating between stimulus categories that vary in the presence or absence of a distinguishing feature, or in their compliance with an expected default state. Using six pairs of stimuli in six experiments, we find evidence that the absence of local and global stimulus features gives rise to slower, less confident responses, similar to absences of entire stimuli. Contrary to our hypothesis, however, the presence or absence of a local feature has no effect on metacognitive sensitivity. Our results weigh against a proposal of a link between the detection metacognitive asymmetry and default reasoning, and are instead consistent with a low-level visual origin of metacognitive asymmetries for presence and absence.

中文翻译：

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第二阶段注册报告：视觉感知中的元认知不对称


表现物体的缺失对心理要求很高。与报告存在视觉刺激相比，人们在报告不存在视觉刺激时速度较慢、信心不足，并且表现出较低的元认知敏感性（主观信心与客观准确性之间的一致性）。然而，什么才算是缺乏刺激措施仍然没有明确的定义。在这份注册报告中，我们询问这种处理不对称是否超出了整个对象的缺失，扩展到由刺激特征或违反期望定义的缺失。我们预先注册的预测是，存在和缺席处理的差异反映了默认的推理模式：除非有相反的证据，否则我们假设缺席。我们预测了在区分刺激类别时，反应时间、置信度和元认知敏感性的不对称性，这些刺激类别在存在或不存在区别特征的情况下，或者在它们是否符合预期的默认状态时会有所不同。在六个实验中使用六对刺激，我们发现证据表明，局部和全局刺激特征的缺失会导致反应变慢、信心不足，类似于整个刺激的缺失。然而，与我们的假设相反，局部特征的存在或不存在对元认知敏感性没有影响。我们的结果与检测元认知不对称性和默认推理之间的联系的提议相悖，并且与存在和不存在的元认知不对称性的低级视觉起源一致。