Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.