Would a pure Type 1 concurrent protocol — silent, concurrent, retrospective — confirm that the explicit layer's cleanest capture still misses the flesh?

Whether the choice-prediction design could run three conditions — silent (the judgment made without verbalisation), concurrent Type 1 (say what is in working memory, never explain why), and retrospective (narrate after the fact) — and whether the concurrent condition would predict the next judgment better than retrospective (less reconstruction) while still below expert (the tacit invisible to both).

The Ericsson–Simon framework distinguishes Type 1 (report what passes through working memory) from Type 2 and Type 3 (explain why, or give retrospective accounts), and only Type 1 is designed to avoid interference. Protocol analysis (Ericsson & Simon, 1980, 1993) holds that verbal reports are valid data when they describe the contents of working memory without requiring the participant to explain or interpret. Type 1 concurrent verbalisation — "say whatever comes to mind as you do the task, do not explain why" — is the framework's least-reactive protocol: it adds the minimal load (saying what is already being thought) and avoids the generative explanation that Wilson et al. found degrades the very correspondence being measured. Type 2 and Type 3 protocols, which ask the participant to generate explanations, are the ones that interfere with judgment — the introspection-illusion literature's "introspecting about reasons decreased attitude–behaviour correspondence" finding applies to explanation, not to description (read 2026-06-21 — Wikipedia: Think aloud protocol (read 2026-06-21); Wikipedia: Protocol analysis (read 2026-06-21)).

Kuusela and Paul (2000) found concurrent protocols are more complete but risk interference, while retrospective protocols have less interference but risk memory loss and reconstruction — and some concurrent protocols produced no interference effects. The comparison is not tacit-vs-explicit but completeness-vs-fidelity: concurrent captures more of what passes through working memory (more complete) but may add load, while retrospective loses the real-time content and must reconstruct. Crucially, some concurrent protocols did not produce interference effects, suggesting that a well-designed Type 1 protocol (no explanation prompts, no slowing) may capture the explicit layer cleanly without degrading the judgment itself. The three-condition design would test this directly: if concurrent Type 1 predicts the next judgment better than retrospective, the advantage is cleaner capture of the explicit layer (less reconstruction); if it predicts equally, the reconstruction in retrospective does not lose real signal; if it predicts worse, the concurrent verbalisation interfered (read 2026-06-21 — Wikipedia: Think aloud protocol — Kuusela & Paul (read 2026-06-21)).

Nisbett and Wilson (1977) argued that people have "little or no introspective access to higher-order cognitive processes" — but they distinguished mental contents (accessible) from mental processes (hidden), and the concurrent protocol captures contents, not processes. The introspection illusion is that people construct narratives about their mental processes rather than reading them directly. But the concurrent Type 1 protocol does not ask about processes — it asks about contents: what words, what criteria, what options passed through awareness. These are the explicit layer's building blocks, and they are genuinely in working memory. The tacit layer — the automatic pattern-matching that happens too fast to narrate — is a process, not a content, and it is invisible to all three conditions (read 2026-06-21 — Wikipedia: Introspection illusion (read 2026-06-21)).

The reactivity literature warns that self-report measures can change the process being measured — but the reactivity is weakest for low-inference reports. Reactivity (the Hawthorne effect's cousin) occurs when individuals alter their performance because they know they are being observed, or when a self-report measure changes the process it measures. Confidence ratings and judgments of learning, which require the participant to generate a new evaluation, are reactive. But a pure Type 1 protocol that asks only "say what you are thinking" does not require generation — it asks for description of what is already there. The reactivity risk is lower, though not zero: the act of verbalising may still slow the expert or shift attention (read 2026-06-21 — Wikipedia: Reactivity (psychology) (read 2026-06-21))).

The honest state. The three-condition design — silent, concurrent Type 1, retrospective — is buildable and unbuilt. The prediction from the framework is: concurrent Type 1 > retrospective (less reconstruction, cleaner capture of the explicit skeleton), but both still below the silent expert's own consistency (the tacit flesh is invisible to both protocols, because procedural knowledge is not in working memory under either). The concurrent condition's advantage over retrospective is the explicit layer's cleanest capture — the questions asked, the options weighed, the criteria named as they pass through — not a window to the tacit. The silent condition is the baseline: if concurrent and retrospective both predict below the silent expert's own next-judgment consistency, the tacit is confirmed invisible to verbalisation. The most informative outcome is the gap between concurrent and retrospective (the reconstruction cost) and the gap between concurrent and silent (the tacit cost) — two gaps that name the two layers the choice-prediction design was built to separate.

uncertain: whether a pure Type 1 protocol can be designed for a midpoint-judgment task that is fast enough to be automatic — if the judgment takes under a second, the expert must either slow down to verbalise (introducing reactivity) or the protocol must be retrospective (introducing reconstruction). The three-condition design's power depends on the task being slow enough for concurrent verbalisation to run alongside it without distortion, and no one has tested whether the midpoint judgment is.