Metacognitive Feelings Connect Object Indexes to Looking Behaviours

Click here and press the right key for the next slide.

(This may not work on mobile or ipad. You can try using chrome or firefox, but even that may fail. Sorry.)

also ...

Press the left key to go backwards (or swipe right)

Press n to toggle whether notes are shown (or add '?notes' to the url before the #)

Press m or double tap to slide thumbnails (menu)

Press ? at any time to show the keyboard shortcuts

Metacognitive Feelings Connect Object Indexes to Looking Behaviours

object index operations

↓

? ? ? metacognitive feelings

↓

patterns in looking durations

So those who, like me, are impressed by the evidence for the hypothesis that four- and five-month-olds’ abilities to track occluded objects are underpinned by the operations of a system of object indexes are left with a question. The question is, What links the operations of object indexes to patterns in looking duration?

I’ve just argued that it can’t be beliefs or knowledge states.

Now I want to suggest that it is something called a metacognitive feeling.

Before I explain what metacognitive feelings are, let me illustrate the idea informally.

What is a metacognitive feeling? First idea : feeling of knowing. Consider a second illustration ... familiarity

Here is a face that I hope will seems familiar to most people. When you see this face, you have a feeling of familiarity. This feeling of familiarity is not just a matter of belief: even if you know for sure that you have never encountered the person depicted here (and trust me, you haven’t), the feeling of familiarity will persist. Nor is the feeling a matter of perceptual experience: you can’t perceptually experience familiarity any more than you can perceptually experience electricity.

(The face is a composite of Bush and Obama. It is chosen to illustrate that the feeling of familiarity is not a consequence of how familiar things actually are; instead it may be a consequnece of the degree of fluency with which unconscious processes can identify perceived items (Whittlesea, 1993; Whittlesea & Williams, 1998). Learning a grammar can also generate feelings of familiarity. Subjects who have implicitly learned an artificial grammar report feelings of familiarity when they encounter novel stimuli that are part of the learnt grammar (Scott & Dienes, 2008). They are also not doomed to treat feelings of familiarity as being about actual familiarity: instead subjects can use feeling of familiarity in deciding whether a stimulus is from that grammar (Wan, Dienes, & Fu, 2008).)

I could go on to mention the feeling you have when someone’s eyes are boring into your back, or the feeling that a name is on the tip of your tongue. But let me focus just on the feelings associated with electricity and with familiarity. These feelings are paradigm cases of metacognitive feeling.

What is a metacognitive feeling? I think it’s a sensation. To illustrate,

contrast two sensory encounters with this wire. In the first you visually experience the wire as having a certain shape. In the second you receive an electric shock from the wire without seeing or touching it.% \footnote{This illustration is borrowed from Campbell (2002: 133–4); I use it to support a claim weaker than his.} The first sensory encounter involves perceptual experience as of a property of the wire whereas, intuitively, the second does not. I take this intuition to be correct.% \footnote{ Notice that the intuition is not that the shock involves no perceptual experience at all, only that the shock does not involve perceptual experience as of any property of the wire. Notice also that the intuition concerns what a perceptual experience is as of, and not directly what is represented in perception. The relation between these two is arguably not straightforward (compare, e.g., Shoemaker (1994, p. 28) or Chalmers (2006, pp. 50--2) on distinguishing representational from phenomenal content). }

The intuition is potentially revealing because the electric shock involves rich phenomenology, and its particular phenomenal character depends in part on properties of its cause (changes in the strength of the electric current would have resulted in an encounter with different phenomenal character). So there are sensory encounters which, despite having phenomenal characters that depend in part on which properties are encountered, are not perceptual experiences as of those properties.

Let me give you two more illustrations [bushObama and Wynn’s magic mice]. ...

All three examples (the feelings of magic, of electricity and of familiarity) show that:

There are aspects of the overall phenomenal character of experiences which their subjects take to be informative about things that are only distantly related (if at all) to the things that those experiences intentionally relate the subject to.

To illustrate, having a feeling of familiarity is not a matter of standing in any intentional relation to the property of familiarity, but it is something that we can interpret as informative about famility.

metacognitive feelings are these aspects of experience.

Wynn 1992, fig 1 (part)

What is a metacognitive feeling? Consider a third (and final) illustration.

Recall this situation. Suppose you have seen it a hundred times before, so you know just what to expect. Still, the tendancy to expect two objects is on some level barely diminished, and event in which a single object is revealled is liable to feel magical in some small way. This feeling of magic is a metacognitive feeling.

object index operations

↓

metacognitive feelings

↓

patterns in looking durations

So my question was how the operations of object indexes might explain patterns of looking duration in habituation and violation-of-expectation experiments. My guess is that some operations of object indexes give rise to metacognitive feelings, which in turn influence looking durations.

object indexes + metacognitive feelings

↓

? ? ?

↓

knowledge of objects

\section{Development Is Rediscovery}

This guess gives rise to a further question (which I want to articulate but won’t attempt to answer). In asking how the operations of object indexes might give rise to patterns in looking duration, we have been concerned with what happens a short interval of time. But the guess about metacognitive feelings raises a question about the course of development in the first months or years of life. Let me explain.

In the beginning Spelke and others conjectured that infants’ abilities to track briefly occluded objects were a consequence of their having core knowledge for objects. This conjecture is related to the later hypothesis about object indexes. The idea is that we can further specify the mechanisms that realise infants’ core knowledge of physical objects by identifying it with two things: a system of object indexes and a system capable of representing physical objects motorically.

So core knowledge of objects is not one thing but three: it is realised by (i) a system of object indexes; (ii) associated metacognitive feelings and (iii) a capacity to represent affordances motorically.

There was always a question about how infants’ core knowledge about objects might explain the emergence of knowledge knowledge (that is, knowledge proper) about objects. Now this question becomes, What is the role of a system of object indexes in the emergence in development of knowledge of physical objects? In short, How do you get from object indexes to knowledge?

Answers to these questions typically rely on \emph{The Assumption of Representational Connections}: the transition involves operations on the contents of core knowledge states, which transform them into (components of) the contents of knowledge states.

This Assumption is required by almost any current account of the developmental emergence of knowledge. It is required, for example, by Spelke’s suggestion that mature understanding of objects, number, and mind derives from core knowledge by virtue of core knowledge representations being assembled (Spelke, 2000); claims by Leslie and others that modules provide conceptual identifications of their inputs (Leslie, 1988); Karmiloff-Smith’s representational re-description (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992); and Mandler’s claim that ‘the earliest conceptual functioning consists of a redescription of perceptual structure’ (Mandler, 1992).

But the Assumption of Representational Connections requires, of course, that core knowledge provides a conceptual identification of objects and some of their properties such as location or size, or at least that it involves standing in some kind of intentional relation to these things.

[Key point is that since metacognitive feelings don’t have [relevant] content, direct representational connections between core knowledge and knowledge proper are impossible.]

But recall the guess about metacognitive feelings linking object indexes to patterns of looking duration. If this guess is right, then it is not true that core knowledge provides a conceptual identification of objects. And it is not true that having core knowledge involves standing in any kind of intentional relation to objects and their properties. This means that we must reject Assumption of Representational Connections. And rejecting this Assumption makes the question about development particularly difficult to answer.

It means that rather than assembing or redescribing representations, development must be a process of rediscovery.

The step from metacognitive feelings to knowledge is like the step from feeling electric shocks to understanding electricity. So coming to know simple facts about particular physical objects may begin with object indexes and the metacognitive feelings these give rise to, but it does not end there. Interpreting the metacognitive feelings may involve interacting with objects, learning to use tools, and perhaps interacting with others and objects simultaneously.

Coming to know facts about physical objects is a matter of rediscovering things already implicit in a system of object indexes.

Some might object that development can’t require such rediscovery because it would be hopelessly inefficient to require things already encoded to be learnt anew. But rediscovery is an elegant solution to a practical problem. If you are building a survival system you want quick and dirty heuristics that are good enough to keep it alive: you don’t necessarily care about the truth. If, by contrast, you are building a thinker, you want her to be able to think things that are true irrespective of their survival value. This cuts two ways. On the one hand, you want the thinker’s thoughts not to be constrained by heuristics that ensure her survival. On the other hand, in allowing the thinker freedom to pursue the truth there is an excellent chance she will end up profoundly mistaken %(Malebranche?) or deeply confused %(Hegel?) about the nature of physical objects. So you don’t want thought contaminated by survival heuristics and you don’t want survival heuristics contaminated by thought. Or, even if some contamination is inevitable, you want to limit it. %So you want inferential isolation. This combination is beautifully achieved by giving your thinker a system or some systems for tracking objects and their interactions which appear early in development, and also a mind which allows her to acquire knowledge of physical objects gradually over months or years, taking advantage of interactions with objects as well as social interactions about objects—providing, of course, that the two are not directly connected but rather linked only very loosely, via metacognitive feelings.

Of course, if the Assumption of Representational Connectedness is wrong and development is rediscovery, then core knowledge can only play a relatively modest role in explaining the developmental acquisition of knowledge. Instead, simple froms of social interaction, perhaps including referential communication or even communication by language will play a key role in the developmental emergence of knowledge of simple facts about physical objects. And of course they can only do this if abilities for social interactions including communication do not already presuppose such knowledge.

But this is a topic for further inquiry. For now, I mainly want to sugggest that we must either reject my claim that core knowledge influences its subject only through modifications of the body, of behaviour and attention and of phenomenology or else face up to the challenge of explaining how development could be a process, not of recycling representations already available in the very first months of life, but of rediscovery.

Keyboard Shortcuts?f

Metacognitive Feelings Connect Object Indexes to Looking Behaviours

Keyboard Shortcuts`?f`