Second-guessing of Spinoza: Psychophysiological and behavioral evidence that believing is default during proposition comprehension

The belief-default model contends that believing is inexorable during comprehension, and falsification is a subsequent, secondary process. By contrast, the Cartesian belief-fixation model argues that naïve propositions may be mentally represented without a truth or falsity stance. In the present research, data from four studies help adjudicate belief-fixation models, favoring the belief-default model: Studies 1-3 show that newly represented propositions are initially believed as the consequences of the truth from a naïve represented proposition will automatically activate contradictory mental information even when this processing impairs task performance (a “false” false alarm belief bias). Naïve propositions cannot be “merely” represented (without a truth stance) during comprehension. Studies 3 and 4 reveal unique electrodermal activity signals corresponding to propositions considered to be either true or false. We argue that the observed autonomic reactivity constitutes the source of two different epistemic emotions associated with the perceived outcomes of a memory search (i.e., “aha” and wrongness, respectively). To account for the psychophysiological results, we hypothesize that the epistemic emotion of familiarity is substantiated by an “aha” emotion which signals the recovery of represented propositions considered true during mnemonic processing. In addition, we show that anti-belief-default conclusions from recent investigations using multinomial processing tree modeling are tenuous as they depend on the type of false information paradigm employed. In sum, the data support the belief-default model and indicate a novel psychophysiological method to distinguish “believed” memory retrieval products from “guessed” responses derived via metacognitive strategies during veridical identification.