What
advances scientific knowledge? One of the answers to this important question is
embedded in Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in adults and
children, which is a heterogeneous collection of essays on how children and
adults understand visual processing and its products.  In this book, progress
in scientific knowledge is illustrated by the work of researchers with diverse
areas of expertise who come together to address an issue, ponder its many
facets, and propose possible avenues of empirical and theoretical exploration.
The result is nothing less than compelling.

The book is edited by Daniel Levin whose exploratory
journey into the realm of metacognition in the visual domain originated from
his work on "change blindness", a puzzling visual phenomenon, which
he and his colleague, Daniel Simons, have investigated at length (see Levin
& Simons, 1997; 2000).  "Change blindness" refers to the human
visual system’s apparent inability to accurately record and consistently
compare the details of contiguous takes of a visual scene.  As a phenomenon at
the intersection between visual analysis and metacognition, it manifests itself
in perceivers lacking awareness of the changes that have occurred in the
scene.  For instance, subjects watching a video that shows an actor carrying
out a simple action (e.g., answering the phone) do not notice that from one
frame to the next a new actor has been substituted for the original one.  To
make this finding even more perplexing, subjects refuse to believe that they missed
such a gross visual change. According to Levin and Simons, the phenomenon of
"change blindness" highlights a dramatic, albeit unexpected,
inconsistency between reality (the visual information provided by the external
environment) and the perceiver’s internal representation and conscious
knowledge of that reality across time. But how does one begin to understand the
origin of this inconsistency and the extent to which it may be the
manifestation of a more general trend in visual cognition?

The
Kent Forum on visual metacognition (2002) was organized for the purpose of
better understanding "change blindness" and other visual phenomena as
they relate to a perceiver’s knowledge and awareness of the processes of
seeing. Thinking and Seeing is a collection of the papers presented at
the forum.  Among the papers that are certain to capture readers’ attention are
the review articles on cognitive developmental research. There, readers can
find useful information on how perceivers’ knowledge of the process of seeing
comes to exist and develops into its adult form.  Levin interprets this work as
the basis for understanding visual metacognition in adult subjects, which is
represented by another collection of remarkable articles.  In the latter,
readers can find descriptions of attention-grabbing phenomena such as the
belief that seeing requires that something leaves the eyes (known as extramission),
perceivers’ perplexing overestimation of the consistency of their monitoring of
visual experiences, the "illusion of explanatory depth" and the
"grand illusion".  They can also find a great deal of information
about different conceptualizations of metacognitive processing and challenging
discussions about future research endeavors.

As
Levin points out, the advantage of relying on several areas of research is that
each one focuses on a slightly (or, at times, very) different set of questions.
For instance, investigations of metacognition tend to focus on the relationship
between online performance in cognitive tasks and one’s awareness of such
performance.  In contrast, research on the development of conceptual knowledge
may focus on how systematic explanations about the visual world come to exist
and change in one’s mind with ageing and/or on how conceptual changes can influence
the processing of information about that world. These diverse questions all
contribute to define the field of visual metacognition, which is still at its
early stages. The answers to these questions can undoubtedly further our
knowledge of how perceivers, young and old, understand their perceptual
experiences and how such an understanding affects online performance.

Without
a doubt, Thinking and Seeing presents an excellent overview of the novel
field of visual metacognition. Readers who are curious about the phenomenon of
"change blindness" can enjoy reading about the experiments conducted
by Levin and Simons. At the same time, they can gather some ideas on how to
explain such a puzzling phenomenon and begin their own explorations into the realm
of visual metacognition. For instance, one of the most compelling explanations
for "change blindness" is the one that relies on evidence
illustrating perceivers’ over-estimations of the efficiency of their monitoring
activities.  That is, perceivers may be aware of the contents of their
perceptions but they are, more often than not, unaware that they fail to
accurately monitor these contents across time. Of course, readers can survey a
rich array of complementary accounts if unsatisfied with this one, thus savoring
the flavor of the scientific debate that underlies any research endeavor. 
Readers who are broadly interested in metacognition can enjoy the papers that
discuss the extent to which existing theoretical knowledge accounts for the
empirical evidence collected by a variety of researchers on awareness and
control of performance.  Readers who are mostly concerned with practical
applications can focus on the article devoted to how metacognitive errors can
affect perceivers’ understanding of legal testimony and to their consequences
for the legal system.  Of course, instructors who wish to cover metacognition
in their undergraduate and graduate courses may find all the articles
noteworthy, and thus desire to include Thinking and Seeing in their
reading lists.  

Above
all, the book is informative and engaging, two adjectives that are not always
linked to edited books that cover special areas of psychological knowledge. Most
of the credit goes to Levin’s masterful selection of an outstanding group of
competent researchers in visual processing and metacognition who can
communicate their knowledge clearly and elegantly.

© 2005 Maura Pilotti

Maura
Pilotti, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Dowling College, New York.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology