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Related Concept Videos

Self-Schemas

Self-Schemas

In general, a schema is a mental construct consisting of a cluster or collection of related concepts (Bartlett, 1932). There are many different types of schemata, and they all have one thing in common: schemata are a method of organizing information that allows the brain to work more efficiently. When a schema is activated, the brain makes immediate assumptions about the person or object being observed.

Self-Discrepancy Theory

Self-Discrepancy Theory

One influential perspective on what motivates people's behavior is detailed in Tory Higgin's self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987). He proposed that people hold disagreeing internal representations of themselves that lead to different emotional states.

The Availability Heuristic

The Availability Heuristic

A heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, and the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):

The Representativeness Heuristic

The Representativeness Heuristic

The representative heuristic describes a biased way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something. For example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.

Hindsight Biases

Hindsight Biases

Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Can you relate this to the phrase "Hindsight is 20/20" now?

Cause and Effect

Cause and Effect

While variables are sometimes correlated because one does cause the other, it could also be that some other factor, a confounding variable, is actually causing the systematic movement in our variables of interest. For instance, as sales in ice cream increase, so does the overall rate of crime. Is it possible that indulging in your favorite flavor of ice cream could send you on a crime spree? Or, after committing crime do you think you might decide to treat yourself to a cone?

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 12, 2025

Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation

Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation

Published on: March 1, 2017

Inference About Absence as a Window Into the Mental Self-Model.

¹Department of Experimental Psychology and All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Open Mind : Discoveries in Cognitive Science

|May 8, 2025

Summary

Understanding absence requires knowing what you would perceive if something were present. This study explores how a mental self-model, crucial for cognitive control, enables this inference, highlighting self-knowledge as key.

Keywords:

absence metacognition self-model

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Psychology
Neuroscience

Background:

Representing absence necessitates counterfactual reasoning.
This reasoning depends on a mental self-model, a schema of one's own cognition.
The mental self-model aids in monitoring and controlling cognitive resources.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose inference about absence as a method to study the mental self-model.
To investigate the structure and function of the mental self-model.
To examine the role of self-knowledge in absence inference.

Main Methods:

Review of findings from low-level perception research.
Analysis of data from visual search experiments.
Examination of evidence from long-term memory studies.

Main Results:

Self-knowledge acts as a computational bottleneck for efficient absence inference.
Alternative theories (direct perception, heuristics) inadequately explain empirical data.
These alternative accounts implicitly rely on a self-model.

Conclusions:

Inference about absence provides a novel framework for empirical self-modelling.
This approach allows probing of mental self-model features not available through introspection.
Future research can empirically investigate self-modelling using absence inference.