Petter Johansson 
Researcher
Phone: +81 +3 5452 5247

petter.johansson@lucs.lu.se
Lund University Cognitive Science
Kungshuset, Lundagård
SE-222 22 LUND, Sweden
As a cognitive scientist my research interests are naturally quite diverse. I started off in philosophy, focusing on philosophy of mind and the classic questions such as the nature of consciousness and intentionality. I was fascinated by the subject, but soon became frustrated by the fact that most philosophy was done without being fully informed by the relevant research in the behavioural sciences. This led me to psychology which I found equally frustrating due to the lack of reference to basic philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Cognitive science, at least as it is practiced at Lund University, provided the eclectic mix of disciplines I was looking for. After having completed my Ph.D. in 2006, and after a 2 year JSPS postdoc in Watanabe Lab at Tokyo University, I have now started another postdoc in Nick Chater's lab at University College London.
Research Activities
Choice Blindness My current research centres on self-knowledge, and especially the relationship between introspection and higher order processing, such as reasoning and problem solving. The simple question is "how much introspective access do we actually enjoy?" As a consequence of the classic paper by Nisbett and Wilson (1977), there has been an ongoing debate regarding the possibility of experimentally deciding this issue. A seemingly simple approach would be to ask participants for reasons behind their choices, such as why they actually bought the car they bought. In general participants readily comply, and give these explanations without much effort. But this does not tell us what is actually going on when we produce these kinds of responses; is this retrieval of stored knowledge, direct access to ongoing processes, or is it confabulation? To study these questions we have constructed a new methodology we call choice blindness.

This experimental design is a new tool for cognitive scientists to systematically study how confabulatory reports are created and how they relate to standard or 'truthful' reports about choice behaviour. We have presented this approach at a number of international conferences, and it is fully explained in a recently published article in Science: Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Read more »

Curriculum Vitae
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Dissertation
2006 Johansson, P. (2006). Choice Blindness: The Incongruence of Intention, Action and Introspection. Lund University Cognitive Studies 130. [PDF]
Selected Publications
2009

Hall, L., & Johansson, P. (2009). You don't know what you want. New Scientist. 18 April, Issue 2704, 26-27. [PDF]

2008

Hall, L., & Johansson, P. (2008). Using Choice Blindness to Study Decision Making and Introspection. In P. Gärdenfors & A. Wallin (Eds.) (2008). Cognition - A Smorgasbord. pp. 267-283. [PDF]

Johansson, P., Hall, L., & Sikström, S. (2008). From Change Blindness to Choice Blindness. Psychologia, 51, 142-155. [PDF]
2006

Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., Tärning, B. & Lind, A. (2006). How something can be said about Telling More Than We Can Know. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 673-692. [PDF]

Hall, L., Johansson, P., Sikström, S., Tärning, B. & Lind, A. (2006). How something can be said about Telling More Than We Can Know:  Reply to Moore and Haggard. Consciousness and Cognition. 15, 697-699. [PDF]

2005

 

Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task. Science, 310, 116-119. [PDF].

Gärdenfors, P. & Johansson, P. (2005). Cognition, Education and Communication Technology. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Link].

Johansson, P. & Gärdenfors, P. (2005). Introduction to Cognition, Education and Communication Technology. In P. Gardenfors & P. Johansson (Eds.) (2005). Cognition, Education and Communication Technology. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp 1-20.
2003

Hall, L., & Johansson, P. (2003). Neurofeedback and Metacognition. In. R. Azevedo (Ed.). AIED 2003 Supplementary Proceedings: Metacognition and Self-regulation in Learning with Metacognitive Tools. 541-556 (also published as Lund University Cognitive Studies, 110).

Hall, L., & Johansson, P. (2003). On the Role of Brain-Imaging in the Calibration of Mental Strategies. In. V. Devedzic, J. Spector, D. Sampson and Kinshuk (Eds.). Proceedings of the The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'03). 396-397 (also published as Lund University Cognitive Studies, 108).

Hall, L., & Johansson, P. (2003). Self-Regulation in Education: A Ubiquitous Computing Perspective. In. Proceedings of the Eleventh International PEG Conference (PEG 2003): Powerful ICT-tools for Teaching and Learning. (CD-Rom). (also published as Lund University Cognitive Studies, 111).