Abstract
While recent studies have emphasized the role of metacognitive judgments in social interactions, whether social context might reciprocally impact individuals’ metacognition remains an open question. It has been proposed that such might be the case in situations involving stereotype threat. Here, we provide the first empirical test of this hypothesis. Using a visual search task, we asked participants, on a trial-by-trial basis, to monitor the unfolding and accuracy of their search processes, and we developed a computational model to measure the accuracy of their metacognition. Results indicated that stereotype threat enhanced metacognitive monitoring of both outcomes and processes. Our study thus shows that social context can actually affect metacognition.
Highlights
Metacognition, i.e., the process of monitoring and controlling one’s own cognitive processes [1], plays a crucial role in the regulation of our behavior [2]
As expected from previous research on visual search tasks, we first found that performance decreased with the number of distractors, an effect that was more pronounced for "Ls" targets than for "Xs" [52]
Replicating these classic results enabled to build a model for the number of inspected items [40,41], and to evaluate whether participants had a good metacognitive access to this variable, by defining a new measure of metacognitive monitoring we called SNSI error
Summary
Metacognition, i.e., the process of monitoring and controlling one’s own cognitive processes [1], plays a crucial role in the regulation of our behavior [2]. It has been proposed that stereotype threat might induce physiological stress and efforts to suppress negative thoughts, thereby taxing working memory resources typically required for successful performance on difficult tasks [13,29] Another possible explanation involves implicit metacognition: stereotype threat might increase individuals’ uncertainty about their abilities, leading to increased attention to their own behavior and performance. It quantifies the ability of participants to introspect the search process, by measuring the absolute difference between the reported SNSI and the actual number of scanned items, which we estimated on the basis of a simple computational model of visual search [39,40,41] This paradigm allowed us to evaluate the impact of stereotype threat on metacognitive monitoring. Performance in the visual search task was a measure of interest, but our ability to observe the negative effects of stereotype threat on performance is not guaranteed, since previous studies have found that the effect of stereotype threat on performance can vanish when the test is too easy [12,22]
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