Lars Hall

We are very happy that someone has finally tried to make sense of rationalization. But we are worried about the representational structure assumed by Cushman, particularly the “boxology” belief-desire model depicting the rational planner, and it seems to us he fails to accommodate many of the interpersonal aspects of representational exchange.

What would it be like if we said one thing, and heard ourselves saying something else? Would we notice something was wrong? Or would we believe we said the thing we heard? Is feedback of our own speech only used to detect errors, or does it also help to specify the meaning of what we say? Comparator models of self-monitoring favor the first alternative, and hold that our sense of agency is given by the comparison between intentions and outcomes, while inferential models argue that agency is a more fluent construct, dependent on contextual inferences about the most likely cause of an action. In this paper, we present a theory about the use of feedback during speech. Specifically, we discuss inferential models of speech production that question the standard comparator assumption that the meaning of our utterances is fully specified before articulation. We then argue that auditory feedback provides speakers with a channel for high-level, semantic “self-comprehension”. In support of this we discuss results using a method we recently developed called Real-time Speech Exchange (RSE). In our first study using RSE (Lind et al, submitted) participants were fitted with headsets and performed a computerized Stroop task. We surreptitiously recorded words they said, and later in the test we played them back at the exact same time that the participants uttered something else, while blocking the actual feedback of their voice. Thus, participants said one thing, but heard themselves saying something else. The results showed that when timing conditions were ideal, more than two thirds of the manipulations went undetected. Crucially, in a large proportion of the non-detected manipulated trials, the inserted words were experienced as self-produced by the participants. This indicates that our sense of agency for speech has a strong inferential component, and that auditory feedback of our own voice acts as a pathway for semantic monitoring.

Experiments on choice blindness support von Hippel & Trivers's (VH&T's) conception of the mind as fundamentally divided, but they also highlight a problem for VH&T's idea of non-conscious self-deception: If I try to trick you into believing that I have a certain preference, and the best way is to also trick myself, I might actually end up having that preference,at all levels of processing.

A fundamental assumption of theories of decision-making is that we detect mismatches between intention and outcome, adjust our behavior in the face of error, and adapt to changing circumstances. Is this always the case? We investigated the relation between intention, choice, and introspection. Participants made choices between presented face pairs on the basis of attractiveness, while we covertly manipulated the relationship between choice and outcome that they experienced. Participants failed to notice conspicuous mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they were presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. We call this effect choice blindness.