Perceptual reality monitoring errors can lead individuals to confuse imagined experiences with real ones. In two experiments involving 150 participants, confidence ratings aligned with decision-making shifts, indicating failures in distinguishing reality at both perceptual and metacognitive levels. While participants showed overall awareness of their errors, this insight did not correlate with specific trial-level confidence. These findings suggest that confidence does not effectively differentiate between imagination and reality during perception, highlighting the complexity of how we assess our own experiences.
Perceptual vividness—the intensity of conscious experience—varies across different experiences, but how the brain registers this variation is unclear. In other psychological domains like number or reward, magnitude is represented independently of sensory features. Reanalyzing existing magnetoencephalography and functional MRI data from two studies that quantified vividness via subjective awareness and visibility ratings, evidence emerged for content-invariant neural signatures of vividness distributed across visual, parietal, and frontal cortices. These findings suggest that neural correlates of subjective vividness may share properties with magnitude codes in other cognitive domains.