Metric error monitoring in the numerical estimates.

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that participants can keep track of the magnitude and direction of their errors while reproducing target intervals (Akdoğan & Balcı, 2017) and producing numerosities with sequentially presented auditory stimuli (Duyan & Balcı, 2018). Although the latter work demonstrated that error judgments were driven by the number rather than the total duration of sequential stimulus presentations, the number and duration of stimuli are inevitably correlated in sequential presentations. This correlation empirically limits the purity of the characterization of "numerical error monitoring". The current work expanded the scope of numerical error monitoring as a form of "metric error monitoring" to numerical estimation based on simultaneously presented array of stimuli to control for temporal correlates. Our results show that numerical error monitoring ability applies to magnitude estimation in these more controlled experimental scenarios underlining its ubiquitous nature.