Can we train ourselves to judge our own minds better?
Providing targeted feedback on the accuracy of people's confidence ratings can improve their overall ability to monitor their own performance, even on completely untrained tasks.
Source
Domain-general enhancements of metacognitive ability through adaptive training
What they did
Researchers recruited a group of adult online participants, ultimately analyzing data from 61 individuals who finished the entire study. Over a series of 10 sessions, participants completed visual perception tasks and recognition memory tasks. For eight training sessions, the experimental group received specialized point-based feedback based on the accuracy of their confidence ratings, while an active control group received points based on their perceptual performance. To keep task difficulty stable and fair, a computer program adjusted the difficulty for each person to keep their performance at roughly 75% correct.
What they found
The training program successfully enhanced metacognitive calibration (how well confidence ratings matched actual performance) exclusively in the experimental group, while the control group actually showed a decrease. This training effect successfully transferred to a completely untrained recognition memory task and a different stimulus type. While the experimental group's overall confidence level shifted rapidly at the start of training, their metacognitive efficiency (how well they distinguished right from wrong answers) improved more gradually over the course of training.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study does not establish whether these metacognitive training effects persist over long periods, as participants were only tested immediately after training. Additionally, because the training and testing were restricted to computerized, simple multiple-choice laboratory tasks, it remains unclear if the improvements would transfer to real-world learning or clinical environments. Finally, while the composite calibration scores showed clear transfer, when analyzed separately, the evidence for domain-general transfer of metacognitive efficiency and confidence bias remained inconclusive.
Key terms
- metacognition
- The ability to monitor, evaluate, and introspect upon one's own cognitive performance and decisions.
- metacognitive efficiency
- A measure of how effectively an individual's confidence ratings distinguish between correct and incorrect answers, independent of actual task performance.
- calibration
- The degree of alignment between a person's subjective confidence and their objective accuracy.
- domain-general
- A cognitive resource or process that is shared across different types of mental tasks, such as perception and memory.
- titration
- An experimental adjustment process that continuously tunes task difficulty to maintain a constant level of performance for all participants.
- signal detection theory
- A mathematical framework used to measure how well an observer separates true signals from background noise, controlling for response biases.
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Quiz yourself
What does the term "metacognition" refer to in cognitive psychology?
Common questions
How does training metacognition differ from training a normal task?
Normal training focuses on making you better at a task (like getting more answers right). Metacognitive training doesn't change how many answers you get right, but instead teaches you to be highly confident when you are correct and less confident when you make a mistake.
Why did the researchers adjust the difficulty of the tasks for each person?
If tasks are too easy or too hard, it distorts how we measure confidence. By adjusting the difficulty so everyone scored around 75% correct, the researchers ensured that improvements in metacognition weren't just a byproduct of getting better at the tasks themselves.
Did the participants' improved self-awareness transfer to other activities?
Yes, to some extent. Participants trained on a visual perception task also showed improved metacognitive calibration on a completely untrained recognition memory task, suggesting that some metacognitive skills are general rather than task-specific.
Why did the active control group's self-awareness actually decrease?
The control group received feedback on how hard the task was rather than how accurate their confidence was. This might have led them to focus too much on external task demands rather than monitoring their own internal decision-making processes.
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