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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

A hierarchy of metacognitive capacities

Sophie Bavard¹, Andrew McWilliams, Flora Chartier, Stephen M. Fleming², Marion Rouault; ¹Paris Brain Institute, ²University College London, University of London

Presenter: Sophie Bavard

How do we evaluate our overall performance on a task? While most research on metacognition focuses on local confidence - our ability to assess accuracy on a trial-by-trial basis - real-world decisions often rely on global confidence, a broader judgment of overall success, measured through self-performance estimates. This study introduces a novel method to investigate self-performance estimates in memory and perceptual tasks. Participants made decisions in blocks containing two item categories and then selected the category they believed they performed better on, reflecting self-performance estimates. By analyzing the relationship between self-performance estimates and factors such as local difficulty, accuracy, response times (RT), and local confidence, our study shows that self-performance estimates rely on different cues depending on the domain: both accuracy and local confidence shaped self-performance estimates in memory, while only local confidence did in perception, without a contribution of RT or difficulty. These findings advance our characterization of metacognitive processes and pave the way for the development of Interventions to modify metacognition.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

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