Are noetic feelings embodied? The case for embodied metacognition

ABSTRACT

One routinely undergoes a noetic feeling (also called “metacognitive feeling” or “epistemic feeling”), the so-called “feeling of knowing”, whenever trying to recall a person’s name. One feels the name is known despite being unable to recall it. Other experiences also fall under this category, e.g., the tip-of-the-tongue experience, the feeling of confidence. A distinguishing characteristic of noetic feelings is how they are crucially related to the facts we know, so much so that the activation of semantic memory can easily result in the production of noetic feelings – a regularity that memory research has often exploited. And yet little is known about the mechanism that produces noetic feelings. Is it solely brain-based or does it depend upon the extracerebral body for its production of feelings? To arrive at an answer, various studies in metamemory research will be analyzed to determine what ought to be made of the mechanism responsible for noetic feelings. I argue that evidence suggests that it relies upon extracerebral processes, in particular cardiovascular processes, the result being support for an embodied view of metacognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Noetic feelings
• epistemic feelings
• metacognition
• metamemory
• embodiment
• interoception

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term “metacognitive” is often deployed in two distinct ways (e.g., Shea et al., 2014). On the one hand, it is used to refer to metarepresentational processes and their products, in which representations are represented explicitly, such as when mentalizing, wherein subjects represent beliefs as beliefs (i.e., entertain second-order mental states). On the other hand, processes and their products are also described as metacognitive when they inform subjects implicitly about cognitive processes. It is exclusively in this latter sense (i.e., implicit metacognition) that noetic feelings are assumed here to be metacognitive.

2. Or as Tulving would describe it, noetic feelings carry information about entities that enable “symbolic [and semantic] knowledge of the world”, which allows “the organism to be aware of, and to cognitively operate on, objects and events, and relations among objects and events, in the absence of these objects and events” (ibid, p. 3).

3. While it is true that the Reder et al.’s model is largely about computation, it also has crucial implementational commitments since it describes exclusively mnemonic nodes. Thus, the computational infrastructure responsible for producing noetic feelings cannot be implemented in an embodied way, since this would amount to the counterintuitive claim that semantic memory is realized by non-neuronal, extracerebral cell populations.

4. It might be useful to point out that the traditional view is likely the consequence of its historical debt to cybernetic theories of metacognitive control structures (Conant & Ashby, 1970; Flavell, 1979; Nelson & Narens, 1990), wherein noetic feelings are conceived of as feedback signals generated by cognitive comparators (see Proust (2013) for an extensive discussion). But by no means is this view a thing of the past. This cybernetic story has been significantly updated in light of the Bayesian brain hypothesis (Knill & Pouget, 2004) and predictive coding architectures (Friston & Kiebel, 2009) to describe noetic feelings as subjectively accessible scalar representations that approximate the precision of the underlying Bayesian distribution (its inverse variance), which, in turn, is theorized to be a representation of the activity in neuronal populations (see, e.g., Meyniel et al., 2015).

5. For example, Nussinson and Koriat (2008) distinguish between cognitive feelings (e.g., feelings of fluency and feelings of knowing), bodily feelings (e.g., feelings of physical intensity), and affective feelings (e.g., feelings of pride).

6. While Alter and Oppenheimer cite embodied cognition as one of the “instantiations” of fluency, embodied information (such as that produced by the activation of the corrugator muscle) is also described as on par with phonological, lexical, syntactic, and mnemonic information, each theorized to involve an independent process for the production of feelings of fluency.

7. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for insisting I think of better and better analogies to articulate the difference between the weak and the strong views. This final formulation helped me to think more clearly about my own stance on the embodied nature of noetic feelings.

8. One reason for my appeal to an intricate brain-body interface, wherein metacognitive information can be thought of as translated into bodily valence and arousal, is to sidestep debates about embodiment that center around the need for constitution over mere causation (see e.g., Adams & Aizawa, 2008). The term “constitution” can be used to describe many distinct relations, from the nomologically or metaphysically necessary to part-whole relations, all of which, if pursued, would require a commitment to certain brain-body metaphysics that are not particularly illuminating for the present case. By talking about the intricateness of the interface, I aim to talk about the importance of embodiment in a manner that relaxes the need to address some of these metaphysical concerns. Thus, I am happy to concede that the body plays (only) a causal role in metacognition, but, I argue, its causal role is so important that an exhaustive account of how metacognitive processes unfold might be lost if this role were neglected. This could be called a “constitutive relation” if by “constitutive” it was meant “explanatorily prudent”.

9. To clarify, this second study, Fiacconi et al. (2017), investigated the relationship between FOK ratings and heartrate acceleration as a function of interoceptive sensitivity during a facial recognitive task, which is distinct but crucially related to Fiacconi et al. (2016), discussed above (Section 3.2), that presented face cues on or off heartbeat (systole or diastole) during a facial recognition task and probed whether this correlated with the onset of noetic feelings.