Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of
conscious inner
thoughts,
desires and sensations. It is a conscious mental and usually purposive process relying on thinking,
reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts,
feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's
soul. It can also be called
contemplation of one's
self, and is contrasted with
extrospection, the observation of things external to one's self. Introspection may be used synonymously with self-reflection and used in a similar way.
On the other hand, introspection can be considered a valid tool for the development of scientific hypotheses and theoretical models, in particular in cognitive sciences and engineering. In practice, functional (goal-oriented) computational modeling and computer simulation design of meta-reasoning and metacognition are closely connected with the introspective experiences of researchers and engineers.
Introspection was used by German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt in the experimental psychology laboratory he had founded in Leipzig in 1879. Wundt believed that by using introspection in his experiments he would gather information into how the subjects' minds were working, thus he wanted to examine the mind into its basic elements. Wundt did not invent this way of looking into an individual's mind through their experiences; rather, it can date to Socrates. Wundt's distinctive contribution was to take this method into the experimental arena and thus into the newly formed field of psychology.
Psychological research on cognition and attribution has asked people to report on their mental processes, for instance to say why they made a particular choice or how they arrived at a judgement. In some situations, these reports are clearly confabulated.[2] For example, people justify choices they have not in fact made.[3] Such results undermine the idea that those verbal reports are based on direct introspective access to mental content. Instead, judgements about one's own mind seem to be inferences from overt behavior, similar to judgements made about another person.[2] However, it is hard to assess whether these results only apply to unusual experimental situations, or if they reveal something about everyday introspection.[4] The theory of the adaptive unconscious suggests that a very large proportion of mental processes, even "high-level" processes like goal-setting and decision-making, are inaccessible to introspection.[5]
