title: Concepts about agency constrain beliefs about visual experience.
abstract: Recent research exploring phenomena such as change blindness, inattentional blindness, attentional blink and repetition blindness has revealed a number of counterintuitive ways in which apparently salient visual stimuli often go unnoticed. In fact, large majorities of subjects sometimes predict that they would detect visual changes that actually are rarely noticed, suggesting that people have strong beliefs about visual experience that are demonstrably incorrect. However, for other kinds of visual metacognition, such as picture memory, people underpredict performance. This paper describes two experiments demonstrating that both these overpredictions of change detection, and underpredictions of visual memory can be linked with intuitions about the visual experience of different kinds of agents. Subjects predicted more visual change detection and poorer visual memory for mechanical representational systems (e.g. computer programs) when these were anthropomorphized using intentional terminology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Peabody College #512, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, TN 37203-5701, USA. daniel.t.levin@vanderbilt.edu
authors.forename: Daniel T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Levin
mesh_terms: D054518:Attentional Blink; D001364:Awareness; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult