Consciously choosing and shaping what to comprehend: a mixed-methods approach to first-person aspects of mental agency in ambiguous speech perception

Abstract

Speech perception plays a key role in many fields of human development and social life but is often impaired by ambiguities on various levels of processing. While these phenomena have been extensively researched in the cognitive (neuro-) sciences according to empirical paradigms that adhere to the third-person perspective of externally measurable behavior, their first-personal and agentive dimensions remain mostly elusive. However, particularly the latter should not be neglected as they can in principle not completely be mapped on quantitative data but are crucial for people in lifeworld situations. We explored this point in the contexts of cognitive penetrability and mental action and conducted a mixed-methods study with qualitative reports on speech perceptual reversal (N = 63) as part of a series of related studies on other modalities. Exposed to respective stimuli, one half of the participants was instructed to voluntarily change their verbal percept, while the other half were told to hold a deliberately chosen word. Qualitative data analysis revealed four typical forms of mental activity, various strategies, and accompanying forms of intention and metacognitive feelings. On the one hand, this activity structure replicates that found in already published studies on vision and non-linguistic audition and thus lends itself to refinement of Posner and Petersen’s (Annual Reviews in Neuroscience, 13, 25–42, 1990) classic model of attentional shift. On the other hand, statistical testing of the quantified data strengthened our hypotheses about mental activities across conditions and modalities, thus also arguing for a cultivable agentive attention awareness in speech perception that even penetrates early stages of speech processing.