In philosophical writings, this form of higher-order, The representation of nothing, see Hearst 1991).Īn overarching difficulty in representing absence may reflect the metacognitive nature ofĪbsence representations to represent something as absent, one must assume that they would Sainsburyġ971 Coldren and Haaf 2000 for a review on Representations of absence in development (e.g.

1980), and in the late acquisition of explicit 2020), in a generalĭifficulty to form associations with absence ( NewmanĮt al. Stimulus absence than stimulus presence in near-threshold visual detection ( Mazor et al. Representing presence, even in simple perceptual tasks, as is evident in slower reactions to Subjects accordingly suggest that representing absence is more cognitively demanding than Likelihood of detecting a hypothetical signal, had it been present. In sensory channels and must instead be inferred based on top-down expectations about the One corollary of this is that presenceĬan be inferred from bottom-up sensory signals, but absence is never explicitly represented As a result, and in order to efficiently represent the environment, perceptual andĬognitive systems have evolved to represent presences, and absence is implicitly representedĪs a default state ( Oaksford and Chater 2001 Oaksford 2002). Visual origin of metacognitive asymmetries for presence and absence.Īt any given moment, there are many more things that are not there than things that are Metacognitive asymmetry and default reasoning, and are instead consistent with a low-level Our results weigh against a proposal of a link between the detection However, the presence or absence of a local feature has no effect on metacognitive Using six pairs of stimuli in six experiments, we findĮvidence that the absence of local and global stimulus features gives rise to slower, lessĬonfident responses, similar to absences of entire stimuli. That vary in the presence or absence of a distinguishing feature, or in their compliance We predicted asymmetries in response time,Ĭonfidence, and metacognitive sensitivity in discriminating between stimulus categories

Presence and absence reflect a default mode of reasoning: we assume an absence unlessĮvidence is available to the contrary.

Our pre-registered prediction was that differences in the processing of In this Registered Report, we ask whether such processing asymmetries extend beyond theĪbsence of whole objects to absences defined by stimulus features or expectation However, what counts as a stimulus absence remains only loosely defined. People are slower, lessĬonfident and show lower metacognitive sensitivity (the alignment between subjectiveĬonfidence and objective accuracy) when reporting the absence compared with presence of Representing the absence of objects is psychologically demanding.

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