Fooling System 1 in the field of perception: Failure to intuitively detect attribute substitution in the flushtration count illusion

Abstract

To facilitate our interactions with the surroundings, the human brain sometimes reshapes the situations that it faces to simplify them. This phenomenon has been widely studied in the context of reasoning, especially through the attribute substitution error. It has however been given much less attention in the field of perception. Recent research on the bat-and-ball problem suggests that reasoners are able to intuitively detect attribute substitution errors. Using a perceptual illusion drawn from the field of magic, we investigate the extent to which a perceptual form of attribute substitution depends on executive resources and can be detected. We also investigate the relationship between susceptibility to attribute substitution error in the flushtration count illusion and in a French adaptation of the bat-and-ball problem. Finally, we investigate the link between the intuitive cognitive style (assessed by the cognitive reflection test) and the susceptibility to the flushtration count illusion. Our results suggest that participants do not detect perceptual attribute substitution error, that this phenomenon could be independent of the executive resources allocated to the task, and could rest on mechanisms distinct from those that produce errors in reasoning. We discuss differences between these two phenomena, and factors that may explain them.

Keywords

Perception dual system bat-and-ball attribute substitution magic reasoning

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bago

De Neys

(2019). The smart System 1: Evidence for the intuitive nature of correct responding on the bat-and-ball problem. Thinking & Reasoning, 3, 257–299.

Changizi

(2009). The vision revolution. Benbella Books.

De Neys

(2006). Dual processing in reasoning: Two systems but one reasoner. Psychological Science, 17, 428–433.

De Neys

Rossi

Houdé

(2013). Bats, balls, and substitution sensitivity: Cognitive misers are no happy fools. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 20, 269–273. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0384-5

Dougal

Schooler

J. W.

(2007). Discovery misattribution: When solving is confused with remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 577–592.

Ekroll

(2019). Illusions of imagery and magical experiences. i-Perception, 10, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669519865284

Ekroll

Sayim

Van der Hallen

Wagemans

(2016). Illusory visual completion of an object’s invisible backside can make your finger feel shorter. Current Biology, 26, 1029–1033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.02.001

Ekroll

Sayim

Wagemans

(2013). Against better knowledge: The magical force of a modal volume completion. i-Perception, 4, 511–515. https://doi.org/10.1068/i0622sas

Ekroll

Svalebjørg

Pirrone

Böhm

Jentschke

van Lier

Wagemans

Høye

(2021). The illusion of absence: How a common feature of magic shows can explain a class of road accidents. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6, Article 22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00287-0

10.

Ekroll

Wagemans

(2016). Conjuring deceptions: Fooling the eye or fooling the mind? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20, 486–489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.04.006

11.

Evans

J. S. B. T.

(2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255–278.

12.

Evans

J. S. B. T.

(2010). Thinking twice: Two minds in one brain. Oxford University Press.

13.

Firestone

Scholl

B. J.

(2015). Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for so-called “top-down” effects. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, 1–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15000965

14.

Frederick

(2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19, 25–42.

15.

Frey

Johnson

E. D.

De Neys

(2018). Individual differences in conflict detection during reasoning. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, 1188–1208.

16.

Jarosz

A. F.

Wiley

(2014). What are the odds? A practical guide to computing and reporting Bayes factors. The Journal of Problem Solving, 7, 2–9.

17.

Johnson

E. D.

Tubau

De Neys

(2016). The doubting System 1: Evidence for automatic substitution sensitivity. Acta Psychologica, 164, 56–64.

18.

Kahneman

(2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.

19.

Kahneman

Frederick

(2005). A model of heuristic judgment. In Holyoak

K. J.

Morrison

R. G.

(Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 267–293). Cambridge University Press.

20.

Kanisza

Gerbino

(1982). Amodal completion: Seeing or thinking? In Beck

(Ed.), Organization and representation in perception (pp. 167–190). Lawrence Erlbaum.

21.

Kuhn

Kourkoulou

Leekam

S. R.

(2010). How magic changes our expectations about autism. Psychological Science, 21, 1487–1493. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610383435

22.

Kuhn

Land

M. F.

(2006). There’s more to magic than meets the eye. Current Biology, 16, R950–R951. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.10.012

23.

Kuhn

Rensink

R. A.

(2016). The Vanishing Ball Illusion: A new perspective on the perception of dynamic events. Cognition, 148, 64–70.

24.

Laukkonen

R. E.

Kaveladze

B. T.

Tangen

J. M.

Schooler

J. W.

(2020). The dark side of Eureka: Artificially induced Aha moments make facts feel true. Cognition, 196, Article 104122.

25.

Levy

Pashler

(2001). Is dual-task slowing instruction dependent? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27, 862–869.

26.

Michotte

Thinès

Crabbè

(1991). Amodal completion of perceptual structures. In Thinès

Costall

Butterworth

(Eds.), Michotte’s experimental phenomenology of perception (pp. 140–167). Lawrence Erlbaum.

27.

Miyake

Friedman

N. P.

Rettinger

D. A.

Shah

Hegarty

(2001). How are visuo-spatial working memory, executive functioning, and spatial abilities related? A latent-variable analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 621–640.

28.

Pailhès

Kuhn

(2020). The apparent action causation: Using a magician forcing technique to investigate our illusory sense of agency over the outcome of our choices. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73, 1784–1795. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021820932916

29.

Ruthruff

Johnston

J. C.

Van Selst

M. A.

(2001). Why practice reduces dual-task interference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27, 3–21.

30.

Ruthruff

Johnston

J. C.

Van Selst

Whitsell

Remington

(2003). Vanishing dual-task interference after practice: Has the bottleneck been eliminated or is it merely latent? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29, 280–289.

31.

Stanovich

(2011). Rationality and the reflective mind. Oxford University Press.

32.

Thomas

Didierjean

(2016a). The ball vanishes in the air: Can we blame Representational Momentum? Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 23, 1810–1817. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1037-2

33.

Thomas

Didierjean

(2016b). No need for a social cue! A masked magician can also trick the audience in the vanishing ball illusion. Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, 78, 21–29. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-015-1036-9

34.

Thomas

Didierjean

Kuhn

(2018). The flushtration count illusion: Attribute substitution tricks our interpretation of a simple visual event sequence. British Journal of Psychology, 109, 850–861.

35.

Thomas

Didierjean

Maquestiaux

Gygax

(2015). Does magic offer a cryptozoology ground for psychology? Review of General Psychology, 19, 117–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000041

36.

Thompson

V. A.

(2009). Dual process theories: A metacognitive perspective. In Evans

Frankish

(Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond (pp. 171–195). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230167.003.0008

37.

Toplak

M. E.

West

R. F.

Stanovich

K. E.

(2011). The cognitive reflection test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks. Memory and Cognition, 39, 1275–1289. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-011-0104-1

38.

Trémolière

De Neys

Bonnefon

J. F.

(2012). Mortality salience and morality: Thinking about death makes people less utilitarian. Cognition, 124, 379–384.

39.

Van Lier

Ekroll

(2020). A conceptual playground between perception and cognition: Introduction to the special issue on amodal completion. i-Perception, 11, 1–4.

40.

Verschueren

Schaeken

d’Ydewalle

(2004). Everyday conditional reasoning with working memory preload. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1399–1404). Lawrence Erlbaum.

41.

Wiegmann

D. A.

Shappell

S. A.

(2003). A human error approach to aviation accident analysis: The human factors analysis and classification system. Ashgate Publishing Company.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.02 MB