No abstract

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been used in thousands of studies across several fields of behavioural research. The CRT has fascinated scholars because it commonly elicits incorrect answers despite most respondents possessing the necessary knowledge to reach the correct answer. Traditional interpretations of CRT performance asserted that correct responding was the result of corrective reasoning involving the inhibition and correction of the incorrect response and incorrect responding was an indication of miserly thinking without feelings of uncertainty. Recently, however, these assertions have been challenged. We extend this work by employing novel eye-tracking techniques to examine whether people use corrective cognitive pathways to reach correct solutions, and whether heuristic respondents demonstrate gaze-based signs of uncertainty. Eye movements suggest that correct responding on the CRT is the result of intuitive not corrective cognitive pathways, and that heuristic respondents show signs of gaze-based uncertainty.

Contemporary dual process models of reasoning maintain that there are two types of thinking – intuitive and deliberative – and that low confidence predicts the engagement of deliberation. Previous studies examining the confidence-deliberation relationship have been limited by 1) issues of endogeneity and between-subject comparisons – concerns that we address by employing debias training; and 2) measures of confidence that are taken relatively late in the reasoning process – a concern that we address by employing a real-time eye-tracking measure of confidence. Self-reported and eye-tracked confidence were negatively related to deliberative thinking, providing novel evidence for the time-course of the confidence-deliberation relationship, and revealing that lowered confidence precedes deliberation.

In our reply to Favela, Amon, & van Rooij (2018) we note points of agreement such as the necessity for the interaction between components in a system for it to be complex emergent and that the Dual Processes approach to human thinking has limitations. We also discuss several critical points of disagreement with the paper. We assert that Complex Emergent Modularity (CEM) does not proliferate the interaction problem but instead proposes a solution to the problem based on the contribution of the global workspace and the process of global broadcast. The nature of the entities which interact is described and emphasized as central to CEM theory.