Stage 2 Registered Report: Metacognitive asymmetries in visual perception

People have better metacognitive sensitivity for decisions about the presence compared to the absence of objects. However, it is not only objects themselves that can be present or absent, but also parts of objects and other visual features. Asymmetries in visual search indicate that a disadvantage for representing absence may operate at these levels as well. Furthermore, a processing advantage for surprising signals suggests that a presence/absence asymmetry may be explained by absence being passively represented as a default state, and presence as a default-violating surprise. It is unknown whether metacognitive asymmetry for judgements about presence and absence extend to these different levels of representation (object, feature, and default-violation). To address this question and test for a link between the representation of absence and default reasoning more generally, here we measured metacognitive sensitivity for discrimination judgments between stimuli that are identical except for the presence or absence of a distinguishing feature, and for stimuli that differ in their compliance with an expected default state. We find that the presence of local and global stimulus features gives rise to faster, more confident responses, but contrary to our hypothesis, has no effect on metacognitive sensitivity. In contrast, an additional post-hoc experiment confirmed robust asymmetries in metacognitive sensitivity for a classical visual detection task (detecting a grating in noise). Our results weigh against our proposal of a link between the detection metacognitive asymmetry and default reasoning, and are instead consistent with a low-level visual origin of this phenomenon.