Psychophysical methods and the evasion of introspection

Abstract

In this paper I argue that certain methodological conventions within psychophysics reflect a continued uncertainty over the reliability of subjects’ introspective judgements. Firstly, different psychophysical methods do not rely equally on the introspective capabilities of experimental subjects. I contrast “minimally introspective” tasks with “introspectionreliant” ones. It is only in the latter that introspection can be said to have a nontrivial role in the subjects’performance. Secondly, my distinction maps onto a number of important methodological divisions in vision science. The introspection-reliant categorization captures many of the tasks typically considered less able to yield useful information regarding the processes underlying visual sensation.