Metacognition and emotion in adolescents with intellectual disability: Links with categorization performance

Abstract

The aim of the study is to evaluate the links between emotion, feeling of difficulty (metacognitive experience) and the categorization performance of adolescents with intellectual disabilities. We hypothesized that categorization performance would be predicted more by feeling of difficulty than by emotion and would differ before and after solving the problem. Indeed, metacognitive experiences and emotions could vary the memory load and thus have an effect on cognitive performance. We recruited 38 participants aged 13 to 18 years, with mild intellectual disability. Feeling of difficulty was measured by the Metacognitive Experience Questionnaire, before and after a categorization task. Participants self-assessed their emotion. Findings show that retrospective feeling of difficulty and emotion accounted for 56.72% of the variance of categorization performance, with greater weight for retrospective feeling of difficulty. The results suggest that participants had some metacognitive experiences that could be mobilized before and after a task, indicating that the monitoring process in this population is inefficient rather than deficient.