• In terms of the levels-of-consciousness model, introspection is a case of reflective consciousness: thinking about one's conscious experience.

• Most introspection is informal, but in research, people may be asked to do formal introspection in a systematic manner and report their inner observations as precisely as possible.

• For example, answering 'yes/no' questions, naming stimuli, or recalling lists of words.

• Ordinary verbal responses are responses to the primary cognitive task of an experiment (e.g., tasks requiring perception, memory, judgment, or decision making).

• Researchers usually disregard the question of whether the verbal responses indicate anything about conscious contents, and are interested in how accurately subjects process information rather than their conscious experience of the information.

• If consciousness is considered at all, usually there is an assumption of concordance between behavior, mental processes, and conscious experience.

• There are instances such as in 'blindsight' and subliminal perception in which concordance breaks down and behavioral responses and conscious awareness become dissociated from one another.

• Some psychologists, especially radical behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner (1987) believe that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, that it plays no role in causing people to behave the way they do.

• Even for psychologists who believe that conscious experience plays a role in controlling behavior, there is the problem that introspective reports are often inaccurate and unreliable.

• Titchener (1867-1927) developed an approach to psychology called structuralism based on a model from chemistry:

• Titchner held that conscious experience is constructed from a limited number of 'elements' of sensory experience and simple feelings, discovered through introspection.

• More complex percepts and ideas were seen as the 'molecules' of experience.

• Titchener taught that it was important for introspecting subjects to avoid the 'stimulus error' of ascribing meaning to their experience (confusing the complex percept with its sensory elements).

• Its theoretical foundation has been discredited: Max Wertheimer and other Gestalt psychologists in Germany argued that, contrary to Titchener's claims, objects are perceived as unified configurations rather than sets of elementary sensations.

• Oswald Kulpe and colleagues discovered 'imageless thought': when asked to introspect and report on the mental events that occurred while they solved a problem, subjects described a sequence of thoughts or images, each one leading closer to the goal.

• Analytic introspection was unreliable with different observers giving different reports under the same conditions.

• The description of one's conscious experience in natural language terms.

• It asks, "What did I perceive/think/feel?"

• It concerns meaningful events, objects and people, and thoughts about them rather than abstract generalizations or unnatural analyses of objects in their sensory elements.

• It can be about dreams and daydreams, real perceptions and actions.

• However, some psychologists doubt that we can know the causes of our own thoughts, feelings, and actions through introspection alone.

• Forgetting: Conscious experiences may be forgotten within a matter of seconds or minutes.

• You never attended to the event.

• The information is in STM, but you did not report it. (You were too busy with another task, protecting your privacy, etc.)

• The information was in STM but was not transferred to LTM.

• The information is in LTM but you cannot retrieve it.

• Reports on episodic memories are not based on detailed videotape-like replays of the original events, but are reconstructions based on factual recall and filling in the gaps with plausible details.

• Two types of reconstruction errors can occur:

• People may report more than they accurately recall by filling in with plausible fabrications.

• Or the memory report may be more orderly than what was really recalled (e.g., in reporting a disorderly, disconnected dream).

• Some conscious experiences cannot be adequately described in words (e.g., love, fear, pains, tastes, odors).

• These are called 'ineffable' experiences, though this term is applied most commonly to mystical religious experiences.

• Sometimes we rely on metaphors and similes: For example, "It feels like my head is being crushed in a vise."

• This may be partially overcome by training subjects to use special vocabularies to describe their experiences.

• Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: The process of observation may alter the thing that is being observed.

• An analogous Introspective Uncertainty Principle: Attempting to introspectively observe one's conscious contents may change the contents that are being observed.

• If researchers want to minimize distortion through observation, they must ask for retrospective reports without giving advanced warning. However, forgetting is a problem with retrospective reports.

• Reluctance to reveal, for example, embarrassing thoughts (e.g., sexual or aggressive thoughts) may result in false reports.

• This can be minimized by asking for the general nature of the conscious experience without details.

• Among the factors that can affect people's behavior in experiments are the demand characteristics: The situational cues from which subjects try to figure out what the experimenter wants them to do.

• Thus the verbal reports may be altered directly through deliberate exaggerations or distortions, or indirectly by trying to produce subjective experiences of the expected type and then accurately reporting them.

• That observations can be independently verified by others is a fundamental principle of scientific research. The fact that introspective reports cannot be verified is the major reason why they have been rejected by many as a research method.

• However. researchers can make reasonable judgments about accuracy by considering:

• their consistency with other reports by the same person or other persons made under similar conditions.

• their consistency with other behavioral evidence, such as facial expressions, eye movements, or physiological measures.

• their consistency with specific theories about the mental processes that occur in the situation under consideration.

• When they don't have direct introspective access to the stimuli or mental processes that caused their feelings/behavior, they may make plausible inferences using whatever information is available.

• These inferences are influenced by people's a priori theories about the causes of human actions.

• Advantage: The researcher can obtain a lot of detailed information about the stream of consciousness with little loss due to forgetting.

• Disadvantage: Both the introspection process and the verbal reporting may alter the flow of conscious experience.

• Advantage: It causes less distortion of the normal progression of thoughts.

• Disadvantage: Thought sampling does not yield as much detailed information about stream of consciousness as thinking out loud does.

• Thought sampling might be brief verbal narrative descriptions, responses to brief questionnaires, nonverbal responses (e.g., pushing a button).

• Thought sampling is used in dream research when subjects are awakened to report dreams.

• Advantage: It does not interfere with ongoing thought processes during the main task, particularly if subjects do not know in advance that they will be asked to make an introspective report.

• Disadvantages: Forgetting may be a serious problem, which will be greater the more time elapses before the report. And it may be particularly susceptible to the problems of reconstruction errors, and of substituting inferences of observations.

• Advantage: Reports are being made from STM, though subjects may sometimes forget to report pertinent thoughts.

• Disadvantage: Knowing that one is to report a certain type of thought may initially affect the frequency of such thoughts, though this problem will decrease with adaptation.

• Advantages: They are open-ended, unconstrained by a particular questionnaire, so anything can be reported. For researchers, diaries can be valuable for showing the range of possibilities for human conscious experience. They may be a rich source of ideas that can be tested with systematic research.

• Disadvantages: They can be unsystematic unless subjects are trained. They are subject to the problems of forgetting and reconstruction errors. Because they may be unsystematic reports made under uncontrolled conditions, they are not useful for rigorous testing of research hypotheses.

• Advantage: The researcher can collect a lot of data from many people quickly and inexpensively.

• Disadvantages: Subject to the problem of forgetting. They are closed rather than open, so response possibilities are restricted. And when they use questionnaires, researchers cannot discover anything that is totally different from the possibilities they had anticipated.

• Though it concerns conscious contents or experiences, introspection is not equivalent merely to having conscious experiences. It is not a videotape-like replay of our experiences.

• Introspection is not a sensory process. There is no introspective organ that stands apart from consciousness and observes it.

• Introspection is not a brain scanner. Subjective conscious experience and objective neurophysiological observations are two different perspectives.

• Introspection is not simply the making of inferences about our mental states based on our overt behavior, as behaviorists would claim it is. But introspection can be influenced by inferences.

• Introspection is not direct inner observation of ongoing thinking.

• This is impossible according to 19th century French philosopher Auguste Comte. He argued, "The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes him reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being identical, how could observation take place?" (1830)

• It is a thought process or set of thought processes. It is an act of reflective consciousness about one's primary conscious experiences for the purpose of describing and interpreting them.

• The data of introspection come from memory: Introspection is therefore retrospection.

• Descriptive introspection is the most natural, straightforward type: the attempt to describe the contents of our stream of consciousness without explaining or analyzing them in detail.

• Introspection is an active thought process, involving discriminating, classifying, and naming of experiences and describing them, often with a metaphor or analogy.

• If introspection is retrospection, why does it seem that we can introspect and report on current conscious experiences?

• The illusion that introspection occurs concurrently with the introspected primary conscious experience arises because in many cases, primary experience remains fairly constant over a period of time because the conditions producing the experience remain fairly constant. We alternate attention between introspection and primary experience.

• Current perception, at least visual perception, seems to be an exception to the claim that introspection is retrospection. We can describe the visual stimulus without relying on memory.

• According to the constructivist theory of perception, when we describe something we currently perceive in the world, we are describing our conscious experience and not the object/scene itself. (The constructivist theory says that our perceptions are interpretations of sensory inputs based on past experiences, assumptions and expectations.