Choice awareness and manipulation blindness: A cognitive semiotic exploration of choice-making
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within cognitive science, “blindness” to choice is commonly treated as typical of human cognition, implying unreliable agents who essentially lack any awareness of their own choices (e.g. Johansson et al., 2005, 2008; Hall et al., 2010, 2013). Within cognitive semiotics, however, choice awareness is seen as a continuous phenomenon, which is susceptible to the influence of a variety of factors. Manipulation blindness is proposed as a more adequate term for what is known in the literature as “choice blindness”, referring to participants’ tendency to accept a choice as if it were their own. This suggests that “blindness” is strictly limited to the level of detection (of the switch of the preferred choice to a non-chosen one), and not to the level of choice.
 Using a cognitive-semiotic framework, I examine manipulation blindness as an “indicator” of choice awareness by employing the factors of memory, consequence, and affectivity, and introduce a two-level hierarchy of choice-making. 43 participants were assigned two tasks combining choices with a) two degrees of consequence (more/less) – based on task instructions, and b) two degrees of affectivity (high/low) – based on stimuli with different degrees of abstractness. Participants were first asked to state their preference for one of two alternatives (choice) . After that they were shown chosen as well as non-chosen pictures and asked to confirm whether the picture presented was the one of their choice (memory). Lastly, they were asked to justify their choice, although some of the trials had been manipulated (i.e. the chosen card was switched with the non-chosen one) (manipulation) . Half of the manipulations were detected, and 75% of these detections occurred for the choices participants remembered correctly. While the consequential impact of the choice did not seem to influence detection, affectivity did. Unlike other experiments that investigate “choice blindness”, the results indicate that manipulation blindness is subject to memory and affectivity, suggesting that we are aware of our choices and that we have, to various degrees, access to our intentional acts.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it