Metacognitive Feelings: A Predictive-Processing Perspective.

Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject's mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue experience. In this article, we advance an account of metacognitive feelings based on the predictive-processing framework. The core tenet of predictive processing is that the brain is a hierarchical hypothesis-testing mechanism, predicting sensory input on the basis of prior experience and updating predictions on the basis of the incoming prediction error. According to the proposed account, metacognitive feelings arise out of a process in which visceral changes serve as cues to predict the error dynamics relating to a particular mental process. The expected rate of prediction-error reduction corresponds to the valence at the core of the emerging metacognitive feeling. Metacognitive feelings use prediction dynamics to model the agent's situation in a way that is both descriptive and directive. Thus, metacognitive feelings are not only an appraisal of ongoing cognitive performance but also a set of action policies. These action policies span predictive trajectories across bodily action, mental action, and interoceptive changes, which together transform the epistemic landscape within which metacognitive feelings unfold.

Is there a continuum of agentive awareness across physical and mental actions? The case of quasi-movements.

While humans routinely distinguish between physical and mental actions, overt movements (OM) and kinesthetically imagined movements (IM) are often viewed as forming a continuum of activities. Here, we theoretically conceptualized this continuum hypothesis for agentive awareness related to OM and IM and tested it experimentally using quasi-movements (QM), a little studied type of covert actions, which is considered as an inner part of the OM-IM continuum. QM are performed when a movement attempt is minimized down to full extinction of overt movement and muscle activity. We asked participants to perform OM, IM and QM and collected their electromyography data. According to participants' reports, they experienced QM as OM in terms of intentions and expected sensory feedback, while the verbal descriptors were independent from muscle activation. These results do not fit the OM-QM-IM continuum and suggest qualitative distinction for agentive awareness between IM and QM/OM.

Hand and Foot Selection in Mental Body Rotations Involves Motor-Cognitive Interactions.

Action imagery involves the mental representation of an action without overt execution, and can contribute to perspective taking, such as that required for left-right judgments in mental body rotation tasks. It has been shown that perspective (back view, front view), rotational angle (head-up, head-down), and abstractness (abstract, realistic) of the stimulus material influences speed and correctness of the judgement. The present studies investigated whether left-right judgements are more difficult on legs than on arms and whether the type of limb interacts with the other factors. Furthermore, a combined score for speed and accuracy was explored to eliminate possible tradeoffs and to obtain the best possible measure of subjects' individual ability. Study 1 revealed that the front view is more difficult than the back view because it involves a vertical rotation in perspective taking. Head-down rotations are more difficult than head-up rotations because they involve a horizontal rotation in perspective taking. Furthermore, leg stimuli are more difficult than hand stimuli, particularly in head-down rotations. In Study 2, these findings were replicated in abstract stimuli as well as in realistic stimuli. In addition, perspective taking for realistic stimuli in the back view is easier than realistic stimuli in the front view or abstract stimuli (in both perspectives). We conclude that realistic stimulus material facilitates task comprehension and amplifies the effects of perspective. By replicating previous findings, the linear speed-accuracy score was shown to be a valid measure to capture performance in mental body rotations.

Intentional mind-wandering as intentional omission: the surrealist method.

Mind-wandering seems to be paradigmatically unintentional. However, experimental findings have yielded the paradoxical result that mind-wandering can also be intentional. In this paper, we first present the paradox of intentional mind-wandering and then explain intentional mind-wandering as the intentional omission to control one's own thoughts. Finally, we present the surrealist method for artistic production to illustrate how intentional omission of control over thoughts can be deployed towards creative endeavors.

Sense of agency for mental actions: Insights from a belief-based action-effect paradigm.

A substantial body of research has converged on the idea that the sense of agency arises from the integration of multiple sources of information. In this study, we investigated whether a measurable sense of agency can be detected for mental actions, without the contribution of motor components. We used a fake action-effect paradigm, where participants were led to think that a motor action or a particular thought could trigger a sound. Results showed that the sense of agency, when measured through explicit reports, was of comparable strength for motor and mental actions. The intentional binding effect, a phenomenon typically associated with the experience of agency, was also observed for both motor and mental actions. Taken together, our results provide novel insights into the specific role of intentional cues in instantiating a sense of agency, even in the absence of motor signals.

First-person dimensions of mental agency in visual counting of moving objects.

Counting objects, especially moving ones, is an important capacity that has been intensively explored in experimental psychology and related disciplines. The common approach is to trace the three counting principles (estimating, subitizing, serial counting) back to functional constructs like the Approximate Number System and the Object Tracking System. While usually attempts are made to explain these competing models by computational processes at the neural level, their first-person dimensions have been hardly investigated so far. However, explanatory gaps in both psychological and philosophical terms may suggest a methodologically complementary approach that systematically incorporates introspective data. For example, the mental-action debate raises the question of whether mental activity plays only a marginal role in otherwise automatic cognitive processes or if it can be developed in such a way that it can count as genuine mental action. To address this question not only theoretically, we conducted an exploratory study with a moving-dots task and analyze the self-report data qualitatively and quantitatively on different levels. Building on this, a multi-layered, consciousness-immanent model of counting is presented, which integrates the various counting principles and concretizes mental agency as developing from pre-reflective to increasingly conscious mental activity.

'Seeing the Dark': Grounding Phenomenal Transparency and Opacity in Precision Estimation for Active Inference.

One of the central claims of the Self-model Theory of Subjectivity is that the experience of being someone - even in a minimal form - arises through a transparent phenomenal self-model, which itself can in principle be reduced to brain processes. Here, we consider whether it is possible to distinguish between phenomenally transparent and opaque states in terms of active inference. We propose a relationship of phenomenal opacity to expected uncertainty or precision; i.e., the capacity for introspective attention and implicit mental action. Thus we associate introspective attention with the deployment of 'precision' that may render the perceptual evidence (for action) opaque, while treating transparency as a necessary aspect of beliefs about action, i.e., 'what I am' doing. We conclude by proposing how we may have to nuance our conception of minimal phenomenal selfhood and agency in light of this active inference conception of transparency-opacity.

Predictions, precision, and agentive attention.

Ransom, Fazelpour, and Mole (this journal - 2017) raise an important puzzle for the 'prediction error minimization' account of cognitive processing. That account depicts all cognitive processing as fundamentally in the business of minimizing prediction errors concerning the evolving flow of sensory information. One of the cornerstones of these highly ambitious, would-be unifying accounts is their depiction of attention as nothing other than the process of optimizing the precision (inverse variance) of critical prediction error signals. But that story, Ransom et al. suggest, cannot accommodate voluntary shifts of attention. In this paper, I show why this challenge to the grand unifying project fails. It fails because it locates the origins of voluntary attention in complexes of unanalyzed desire rather than in changing complexes of beliefs.

Deciding as Intentional Action: Control over Decisions.

Common-sense folk psychology and mainstream philosophy of action agree about decisions: these are under an agent's direct control, and are thus intentional actions for which agents can be held responsible. I begin this paper by presenting a problem for this view. In short, since the content of the motivational attitudes that drive deliberation and decision remains open-ended until the moment of decision, it is unclear how agents can be thought to exercise control over what they decide at the moment of deciding. I note that this problem might motivate a non-actional view of deciding-a view that decisions are not actions, but are instead passive events of intention acquisition. For without an understanding of how an agent might exercise control over what is decided at the moment of deciding, we lack a good reason for maintaining commitment to an actional view of deciding. However, I then offer the required account of how agents exercise control over decisions at the moment of deciding. Crucial to this account is an understanding of the relation of practical deliberation to deciding, an understanding of skilled deliberative activity, and the role of attention in the mental action of deciding.