Metacognition
Can people know they are right when they are guessing?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People can accurately judge whether their decisions are correct even when their overall decision accuracy is completely at chance.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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An observer can maintain significant metacognitive accuracy and evaluate whether their decisions were correct even when their primary decision accuracy is at chance levels.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Metacognitive monitoring can operate even when decision performance is at chance level, showing that individuals can discriminate between their correct and incorrect answers without performing well on the primary task itself.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Aggregate of eight artificial-grammar-learning experiments; first- vs second-order d′ in at-chance vs above-chance classifiers
- N
- N=450 · Students 18–40; metacognitive analysis subset with computable d′: 165 above chance, 33 at chance
- Population
- Paid or course-credit student volunteers in AGL experiments
- Outcome
- Second-order (confidence) discrimination accuracy among participants whose first-order grammaticality judgments were at chance
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Can people know they are right when they are guessing?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
450 student volunteers
Participants were 450 student volunteers (227 male, 223 female) ages 18 to 40 years ( M = 22, SD = 3.53), each of whom were paid £3 or given course credit to take part in one of eight AGL experiments.
first 75% of trials
We therefore selected participants for whom d ′ 1 was less than or equal to 0 for the first 75% of trials.
Key findings
For the 33 participants performing at chance, metacognitive sensitivity was significantly above zero, showing an effect size of 0.40. Their confidence-accuracy slope showed a 9% difference in accuracy between confident and unconfident trials. This metacognitive accuracy did not differ significantly from the 165 participants who performed above chance.
Methodology
The researchers analyzed data from 450 student volunteers who completed artificial-grammar tasks. To evaluate awareness without decision accuracy, they selected participants who performed at chance on the first 75% of trials, leaving 33 participants for the final analysis. They then measured decision and metacognitive accuracy on the remaining final 25% of trials.
Limitations
The primary limitation is the small sample size of 33 participants who met the strict criteria for performing at chance. In addition, the study relied on artificial-grammar learning, so it does not prove that this phenomenon occurs in other domains like basic sensory perception.
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