Metacognitive Inferences Research Articles

Knowing that you know that you know? An extreme-confidence heuristic can lead to above-chance discrimination of metacognitive performance.

In daily life, we can not only estimate confidence in our inferences ('I'm sure I failed that exam'), but can also estimate whether those feelings of confidence are good predictors of decision accuracy ('I feel sure I failed, but my feeling is probably wrong; I probably passed'). In the lab, by using simple perceptual tasks and collecting trial-by-trial confidence ratings visual metacognition research has repeatedly shown that participants can successfully predict the accuracy of their perceptual choices. Can participants also successfully evaluate 'confidence in confidence' in these tasks? This is the question addressed in this study. Participants performed a simple, two-interval forced choice numerosity task framed as an exam. Confidence judgements were collected in the form of a 'predicted exam grade'. Finally, we collected 'meta-metacognitive' reports in a two-interval forced-choice design: trials were presented in pairs, and participants had to select that in which they thought their confidence (predicted grade) best matched their accuracy (actual grade), effectively minimizing their quadratic scoring rule (QSR) score. Participants successfully selected trials on which their metacognition was better when metacognitive performance was quantified using area under the type 2 ROC (AUROC2) but not when using the 'gold-standard' measure m-ratio. However, further analyses suggested that participants selected trials on which AUROC2 is lower in part via an extreme-confidence heuristic, rather than through explicit evaluation of metacognitive inferences: when restricting analyses to trials on which participants gave the same confidence rating AUROC2 no longer differed as a function of selection, and likewise when we excluded trials on which extreme confidence ratings were given. Together, our results show that participants are able to make effective metacognitive discriminations on their visual confidence ratings, but that explicit 'meta-metacognitive' processes may not be required.

The Meaning of Distraction: How Metacognitive Inferences from Distraction during Multitasking Affect Brand Evaluations

AbstractConsumers often encounter advertisements in the background while primarily focused on other stimuli (e.g., while multitasking). Consumers’ perceived level of distraction by these background ads serves as a metacognitive cue from which inferences are drawn. When consumers perceive themselves to be relatively distracted by a background advertisement, they draw on an underlying lay theory that distraction implies interest in the contents of the distracting stimulus to make the metacognitive inference that they have positive evaluations of the advertised brand. Across five studies, we provide evidence for this proposed metacognitive inferential process by demonstrating that perceived distraction does not enhance brand evaluations when the distraction = interest lay theory is not perceived to be (1) diagnostic or (2) applicable to the current context (e.g., when consumers have little interest in the product category being advertised). Thus, this research introduces distraction as a new metacognitive experience from which consumers draw inferences and offers important insights into when and how background ads shape brand evaluations.

Temporal Metacognition as the Decoding of Self-Generated Brain Dynamics.

Metacognition, the ability to know about one's thought process, is self-referential. Here, we combined psychophysics and time-resolved neuroimaging to explore metacognitive inference on the accuracy of a self-generated behavior. Human participants generated a time interval and evaluated the signed magnitude of their temporal production. We show that both self-generation and self-evaluation relied on the power of beta oscillations (β; 15-40 Hz) with increases in early β power predictive of increases in duration. We characterized the dynamics of β power in a low-dimensional space (β state-space trajectories) as a function of timing and found that the more distinct trajectories, the more accurate metacognitive inferences were. These results suggest that β states instantiate an internal variable determining the fate of the timing network's trajectory, possibly as release from inhibition. Altogether, our study describes oscillatory mechanisms for timing, suggesting that temporal metacognition relies on inferential processes of self-generated dynamics.

A metacognitive illusion in monkeys.

Like humans, monkeys can make accurate judgements about their own memory by reporting their confidence during cognitive tasks. Some have suggested that animals use associative learning to make accurate confidence judgements, while others have suggested animals directly access and estimate the strength of their memories. Here we test a third, non-exclusive possibility: perhaps monkeys, like humans, base metacognitive inferences on heuristic cues. Humans are known to use cues like perceptual fluency (e.g. how easy something is to see) when making metacognitive judgements. We tested monkeys using a match-to-sample task in which the perceptual fluency of the stimuli was manipulated. The monkeys made confidence wagers on their accuracy before or after each trial. We found that monkeys' wagers were affected by perceptual fluency even when their accuracy was not. This is novel evidence that animals are susceptible to metacognitive illusions similar to those experienced by humans.

Metacognitive inferences from other people's memory performance.

Three studies show that people draw metacognitive inferences about events from how well others remember the event. Given that memory fades over time, detailed accounts of distant events suggest that the event must have been particularly memorable, for example, because it was extreme. Accordingly, participants inferred that a physical assault (Study 1) or a poor restaurant experience (Studies 2-3) were more extreme when they were well remembered one year rather than one week later. These inferences influence behavioral intentions. For example, participants recommended a more severe punishment for a well-remembered distant rather than recent assault (Study 1). These metacognitive inferences are eliminated when people attribute the reporter's good memory to an irrelevant cause (e.g., photographic memory), thus undermining the informational value of memory performance (Study 3). These studies illuminate how people use lay theories of memory to learn from others' memory performance about characteristics of the world. (PsycINFO Database Record

Spontaneous Metacognition in Rhesus Monkeys

Metacognition is the ability to think about thinking. Although monitoring and controlling one’s knowledge is a key feature of human cognition, its evolutionary origins are debated. In the current study, we examined whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta; N = 120) could make metacognitive inferences in a one-shot decision. Each monkey experienced one of four conditions, observing a human appearing to hide a food reward in an apparatus consisting of either one or two tubes. The monkeys tended to search the correct location when they observed this baiting event, but engaged in information seeking—by peering into a center location where they could check both potential hiding spots—if their view had been occluded and information seeking was possible. The monkeys only occasionally approached the center when information seeking was not possible. These results show that monkeys spontaneously use information about their own knowledge states to solve naturalistic foraging problems, and thus provide the first evidence that nonhumans exhibit information-seeking responses in situations with which they have no prior experience.

Who owns implicit attitudes? Testing a metacognitive perspective.

Metacognitive inferences about ownership for one's implicit attitudes have the power to turn implicit bias into explicit prejudice. In Study 1, participants were assigned to construe their implicit attitudes toward gay men as belonging to themselves (owned) or as unrelated to the self (disowned). Construing one's implicit responses as owned led to greater implicit-explicit attitude correspondence. In Study 2, we measured ownership for implicit attitudes as well as self-esteem. We predicted that ownership inferences would dictate explicit attitudes to the degree that people had positive views of the self. Indeed, higher ownership for implicit bias was associated with greater implicit-explicit attitude correspondence, and this effect was driven by participants high in self-esteem. Finally, in Study 3, we manipulated inferences of ownership and measured self-esteem. Metacognitions of ownership affected implicit-explicit attitude correspondence but only among those with relatively high self-esteem. We conclude that subjective inferences about implicit bias affect explicit prejudice.

Prevention of Intention Invention in the Affect Misattribution Procedure

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is one of the most promising indirect measures, showing high reliability and large effect sizes. However, the AMP has been recently criticized for being susceptible to explicit influences, in that priming effects are larger and more reliable among participants who report that they intentionally responded to the primes instead of the targets. Consistent with interpretations of these effects in terms of retrospective confabulation, two experiments obtained reliable priming effects when (a) participants lacked meta-cognitive knowledge about their responses to the primes and (b) participants’ attention was directed away from response-eliciting features of the primes. Under either of these conditions, priming effects were unrelated to self-reported intentionality, although self-reported intentionality was positively related to priming effects under control conditions. The findings highlight the contribution of meta-cognitive inferences to retrospective self-reports of intentionality and suggest an effective procedure to rule out explicit influences in the AMP.

Implicit Bias and the Illusion of Conscious Ill Will

Implicit bias is defined, in part, by a lack of intent. Yet the implicit attitudes literature has made little contact with research on the experience of conscious will, which suggests that the feeling of conscious intent is an inference rather than a direct report of how actions are caused. We tested the hypothesis that inferences about one’s intentions shape whether an automatically activated attitude is endorsed explicitly. In a first study, individuals who perceived their attitudes toward gay men to be intended showed stronger implicit–explicit correspondence. In a second study, we manipulated perceptions of intent. Inferences that implicit bias was intended caused participants to express those biases on an explicit measure. A third study replicated the experimental effects and found that metacognitions of intent were especially influential among individuals who were motivated to be unprejudiced. Results suggest that metacognitive inferences about intent can shape whether automatically activated bias becomes explicitly endorsed prejudice.

The subjective sense of feeling satiated.

The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues. More specifically, while satiation is a function of the actual amount consumed, it also depends on the subjective sense of how much one has recently consumed. We demonstrate the influence of this subjective sense of satiation and show that it is driven by metacognitive cues such as the ease of retrieval of past experiences (Experiments 1 and 2) and can also be directly manipulated by providing a normative standard for consumption quantity (Experiment 3). Our research demonstrates that satiety is not driven solely by the amount and timing of past consumption, thereby establishing the role of higher order metacognitive inferences in satiation and providing insight into how they underlie the construction of satiation.

The Subjective Sense of Feeling Satiated

The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues. More specifically, while satiation is a function of the actual amount consumed, it also depends on the subjective sense of how much one has recently consumed. We demonstrate the influence of this subjective sense of satiation, and show it is driven by metacognitive cues such as the ease of retrieval of past experiences (Experiments 1 and 2), and can also be directly manipulated by providing a normative standard for consumption quantity (Experiment 3). Our research demonstrates that satiety is not driven solely by the amount and timing of past consumption, thereby establishing the role of higher-order metacognitive inferences in satiation and providing insight into how they underlie the construction of satiation.

Causal uncertainty and metacognitive inferences about goal attainment

These four studies investigated G. Weary and J. A. Edwards’ (1996) hypothesis that causal uncertainty feelings serve as input to perceivers regarding the adequacy of their causal knowledge and thus determine the amount of processing accorded a given task. Participants worked on a task until they had satisfied an assigned stop rule. In three experiments, high causally uncertain people processed more information under a sufficiency of information rule and less under an enjoyment rule, whereas low causally uncertain people generally did not differentiate between the rules. In the last experiment, low causally uncertain people exhibited a similar pattern to the chronic causally uncertain individuals in the first experiments, but only after their causal uncertainty beliefs and feelings had been primed.

Metacognitive inferences in source memory judgements: The role of perceived differences in item recognition

This research investigated the hypothesis that metacognitive inferences in source memory judgements are based on the recognition or nonrecognition of an event together with perceived or expected differences in the recognizability of events from different sources. The hypothesis was tested with a multinomial source-monitoring model that allowed separation of source-guessing tendencies for recognized and unrecognized items. Experiments 1A and 1B manipulated the number of item presentations as relevant source information and revealed differential guessing tendencies for recognized and unrecognized items, with a bias to attribute unrecognized items to the source associated with poor item recognition. Experiments 2A and 2B replicated the findings with a manipulation of presentation time and extended the analysis to subjective differences in item recognition. Experiments 3A and 3B used more natural source information by varying type of acoustic signal and demonstrated that subjective theories about differences in item recognition are sufficient to elicit differential source-guessing biases for recognized and unrecognized items. Together the findings provide new insights into the cognitive processes underlying source memory decisions, which involve episodic memory and reconstructive tendencies based on metacognitive beliefs and general world knowledge.