In choice blindness (CB) experiments participants often accept a manipulated outcome as their actual choice. In a typical CB experiment the manual actions that participants perform are always correct (pointing, writing, etc.), while the outcome is mismatched. However, what would happen if an error was induced at the motor level, but the outcome nevertheless remained correct? We investigated this by having participants drag a mouse cursor across the screen to the face they found the most attractive, while we manipulated either the outcome (classic CB), or the cursor (forced motor deviation), or sometimes both. Interestingly, what we found was that when the cursor was manipulated but not the outcome, the motor ‘wrongness’ would override the goal ‘rightness’, and participants ended up rejecting the outcome they actually wanted. We will discuss the implications of this new reverse choice blindness effect for theories of self-monitoring, agency and preference change.

Using a choice blindness paradigm, it is possible to switch decisions and outcomes in simple choice tasks. Such switches have been found to carry over into later choices, hypothesized to be mediated by beliefs about earlier decisions. Here we investigated participants’ memories for stimuli in a simple choice blindness task involving preferential choices between pairs of faces. We probed participants’ recognition and source memory following a round of choices where on some trials participants were presented with the opposite face to the one they actually selected. We found no effect on recognition memory accuracy. Source memory was impaired such that participants failing to detect the manipulation later misremembered recognized non-chosen faces as being previously chosen. The findings are discussed in the light of self-perception theory and previous work on how beliefs affect memories for choices

Choice blindness is a puzzling phenomenon, showing how people often fail to detect a mismatch between their intentions and outcomes and then confabulate reasons for choices they never made. Despite extensive replications, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underpinning it. To tackle this question, we report an online experiment showing for the first time that people still illusorily self-attribute unchosen outcomes despite being explicitly instructed to detect false feedbacks. Comparing standard implicit choice blindness with our new explicit task, we show how prior beliefs about manipulations and stimuli discriminability influence detection. Building on these results, we sketch a preliminary Bayesian model of choice blindness suggesting that choice blindness occurs when beliefs in the reliability of feedback override monitoring related cues indicative of a mismatched outcome. Finally, we discuss practical advantages of explicit task to study choice blindness and implications for the sense of agency and self-knowledge.

Choice blindness is a cognitive phenomenon describing that when people receive false feedback about a choice they just made, they often accept the outcome as their own. Little is known about what predisposes people to correct manipulations they are subjected to in choice blindness studies. In this study, 118 participants answered a political attitude survey and were then asked to explain some of their responses out of which three had been manipulated to indicate an opposite position. Just over half (58.4%) of the manipulations were corrected. We measured extremity, centrality and commitment for each attitude, and one week prior to the experiment we assessed participants’ preference for consistency, need for cognition and political awareness. Only extremity was able to predict correction. The results highlight the elusiveness of choice blindness and speak against dissonance and lack of motivation to engage in cognitively demanding tasks as explanations why the effect occurs.

The role of intentions in motor planning is heavily weightedin classical psychological theories, but their role in generat-ing eye movements, and our awareness of these oculomotorintentions, has not been investigated explicitly. In this study,the extent to which we monitor oculomotor intentions, i.e.the intentions to shift one’s gaze towards a specific location,and whether they can be expressed in conscious experience,is investigated. A forced-choice decision task was developedwhere a pair of faces moved systematically across a screen.In some trials, the pair of faces moved additionally as soon asthe participants attempted to gaze at one of the faces, prevent-ing them from ever viewing it. The results of the experimentsuggest that humans in general do not monitor their eye move-ment intentions in a way that allows for mismatches betweenplanned gaze landing target and resulting gaze landing targetto be consciously experienced during decision-making.

False feedback on choices has been documented to inducelasting preference change. Here we extend such effects to thepolitical domainand investigatethetemporal persistence ofinduced preferences, as well as, the possible role the length ofconfabulatory justifications may play. We conducted a two-day choice blindness experiment using political statements,with sessions being roughly one week apart. Changes inpolitical preferences remained one week after initialresponses, and were most prominent in participants who wereallowed to confabulate freely. These findings, being the firstto demonstrate lasting preference change using choiceblindness, are discussed in light of constructivist approachesto attitude formation through a process of self-perception.