Is It Possible to Read Other People’s Confidence While Testing Their Implicit Learning?

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that observers can accurately read a partner’s confidence in their decision without verbal information exchange. The main question of the present study concerns the possibility of an accurate reading of the metacognitive experiences of others if they make decisions based on implicit knowledge. The second question addressed the predictors of such mindreadings if they are possible. The experiment was conducted using an artificial grammar learning paradigm. Participants worked in dyads: the Learner implicitly learned to classify stimuli as grammatical and non-grammatical, and the Observer observed the classification process while having no access to the stimuli, and not communicating with the partner. The Observer’s judgment of the Learner’s confidence, as well as the Learner's judgment of his/her confidence, were recorded. The results demonstrate that the Learner's confidence judgments correlate with the Observer's judgments of his/her confidence. Moreover, only the confidence judgments of the Learner correlate with the classification accuracy. It is concluded that intrapersonal confidence judgments and interpersonal confidence judgments are partially guided by the same criteria (in particular, response time), however, the Learners’ judgments of their own confidence in the decisions are more sensitive to the implicit knowledge