Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, unaware of the existence of the response, and unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do (...) so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (shrink)

People tend to grossly overestimate the size of their mirror-reflected face. Although this overestimation bias is robust, not much is known about its relationships to self-face perception. In two experiments, we investigated the overestimation bias as a function of the presentation of the own face , the identity of the seen face, and prior exposure to a real mirror. For this we developed a computerized task requiring size estimations of displayed faces. We replicated the observation that people overestimate the size (...) of their mirror-reflected face and showed that the overestimation can be reduced following a brief mirror exposure. We also found that left–right reversal modulates the overestimation bias, depending on the perceived face’s identity. These data underline the enhanced familiarity of left–right reversed self-faces and the importance of size perception for understanding mirror reflection processing. (shrink)