Reality monitoring decision policies and the slowness of consciousness
- 25 June 2026
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Vol. 49, e186
Abstract
Fleming and Michel suggest that conscious vision reflects a reality monitoring (RM) mechanism that evolved to separate planning from perception. Here, I critically examine the RM decision policy implied by the authors – a slow, winner-take-all strategy tagging only one first-order representation as “real.” Specifically, I explore how expectations about environmental or reality-tagging stability may mask alternative RM decision policies, with important implications for learning and the evolutionary emergence and function of consciousness.Keywords
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