Abstract
Human behavior depends on the ability to effectively introspect about our performance. For simple perceptual decisions, this introspective or metacognitive ability varies substantially across individuals and is correlated with the structure of focal areas in prefrontal cortex. This raises the possibility that the ability to introspect about different perceptual decisions might be mediated by a common cognitive process. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether inter-individual differences in metacognitive ability were correlated across two different perceptual tasks where individuals made judgments about different and unrelated visual stimulus properties. We found that inter-individual differences were strongly correlated between the two tasks for metacognitive ability but not objective performance. Such stability of an individual’s metacognitive ability across different perceptual tasks indicates a general mechanism supporting metacognition independent of the specific task.
Highlights
Everyone, in their everyday lives, regularly makes decisions upon their knowledge of the outside world and the confidence they have in their knowledge
Metacognitive ability can be expressed as the mapping between objective performance, such as a perceptual judgment on the duration of a flash, and subjective confidence in the accuracy of such an objective judgment (Kunimoto, Miller, & Pashler, 2001; Galvin, Podd, Drga, & Whitmore, 2003; Lau & Passingham, 2006)
Our tasks produced a variable range of objective performance and metacognitive ability that were neither at ceiling nor floor
Summary
In their everyday lives, regularly makes decisions upon their knowledge of the outside world and the confidence they have in their knowledge. A student facing the choice of university major will base their decision upon a self-evaluation of their strengths and weakness. This knowledge about one’s own cognition is known as metacognitive knowledge (Flavell, 1979; Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994). C. Song et al / Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011) 1787–1792 that was studied) but did not address whether the inter-individual variability in metacognitive ability observed was related to the perceptual task on which the participants evaluated their performance, or might generalize to other tasks. We compared the metacognitive ability of a group of individuals independently evaluating their performance on two different perceptual tasks. In contrast to the traditional framework suggesting the involvement of task-specific brain mechanisms (Nelson & Narens, 1990), our study indicates that metacognitive ability may be mediated, at least for visual perceptual tasks, by a single brain mechanism
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