{"title":"More than words: can free reports adequately measure the richness of perception?","authors":"Rony Hirschhorn, Liad Mudrik","doi":"10.1093/nc/niae035","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The question of the richness (or sparseness) of conscious experience has evoked ongoing debate and discussion. Claims for both richness and sparseness are supported by empirical data, yet they are often indirect, and alternative explanations have been put forward. Recently, it has been suggested that current experimental methods limit participants' responses, thereby preventing researchers from assessing the actual richness of perception. Instead, free verbal reports were presented as a possible way to overcome this limitation. As part of this approach, a novel paradigm of freely reported words was developed using a new metric, intersubjective agreement (IA), with experimental results interpreted as capturing aspects of conscious perception. Here, we challenge the validity of freely reported words as a tool for studying the richness of conscious experience. We base our claims on two studies (each composed of three experiments), where we manipulated the richness of percepts and tested whether IA changed accordingly. Five additional control experiments were conducted to validate the experimental logic and examine alternative explanations. Our results suggest otherwise, presenting four challenges to the free verbal report paradigm: first, impoverished stimuli did not evoke lower IA scores. Second, the IA score was correlated with word frequency in English. Third, the original positive relationship between IA scores and rated confidence was not found in any of the six experiments. Fourth, a high rate of nonexisting words was found, some of which described items that matched the gist of the scene but did not appear in the image. We conclude that a metric based on freely reported words might be better explained by vocabulary conventions and gist-based reports than by capturing the richness of perception.</p>","PeriodicalId":52242,"journal":{"name":"Neuroscience of Consciousness","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11498181/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Neuroscience of Consciousness","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niae035","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, BIOLOGICAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The question of the richness (or sparseness) of conscious experience has evoked ongoing debate and discussion. Claims for both richness and sparseness are supported by empirical data, yet they are often indirect, and alternative explanations have been put forward. Recently, it has been suggested that current experimental methods limit participants' responses, thereby preventing researchers from assessing the actual richness of perception. Instead, free verbal reports were presented as a possible way to overcome this limitation. As part of this approach, a novel paradigm of freely reported words was developed using a new metric, intersubjective agreement (IA), with experimental results interpreted as capturing aspects of conscious perception. Here, we challenge the validity of freely reported words as a tool for studying the richness of conscious experience. We base our claims on two studies (each composed of three experiments), where we manipulated the richness of percepts and tested whether IA changed accordingly. Five additional control experiments were conducted to validate the experimental logic and examine alternative explanations. Our results suggest otherwise, presenting four challenges to the free verbal report paradigm: first, impoverished stimuli did not evoke lower IA scores. Second, the IA score was correlated with word frequency in English. Third, the original positive relationship between IA scores and rated confidence was not found in any of the six experiments. Fourth, a high rate of nonexisting words was found, some of which described items that matched the gist of the scene but did not appear in the image. We conclude that a metric based on freely reported words might be better explained by vocabulary conventions and gist-based reports than by capturing the richness of perception.
意识经验的丰富性(或稀疏性)问题一直在引起争论和讨论。关于丰富性和稀疏性的说法都得到了经验数据的支持,但它们往往是间接的,也有人提出了其他解释。最近,有人提出,目前的实验方法限制了参与者的回答,从而使研究人员无法评估感知的实际丰富程度。相反,自由口头报告被认为是克服这种限制的一种可能方法。作为这种方法的一部分,我们使用一种新的指标--主观间一致(IA)--开发了一种新的自由言语报告范式,并将实验结果解释为捕捉有意识感知的各个方面。在此,我们对自由报告词作为研究意识体验丰富性的工具的有效性提出质疑。我们的主张基于两项研究(每项研究由三个实验组成),在这两项研究中,我们操纵了知觉的丰富程度,并测试了IA是否会发生相应的变化。此外,我们还进行了五项对照实验,以验证实验逻辑并检验其他解释。我们的结果表明并非如此,这对自由言语报告范式提出了四个挑战:首先,贫乏的刺激并没有引起较低的 IA 分数。第二,IA 分数与英语词汇频率相关。第三,在六次实验中,都没有发现 IA 分数与信心评级之间原本存在的正相关关系。第四,我们发现了大量不存在的单词,其中一些单词描述了与场景要点相匹配的物品,但并没有出现在图像中。我们的结论是,基于自由报告词的度量方法可能更能解释词汇习惯和基于要点的报告,而不是捕捉感知的丰富性。