Metacognition
Do we read our own minds with the same system we use for others?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When the ability to read other people's minds is weakened, either in autism or by a competing mindreading task, people also become worse at judging their own confidence, suggesting one shared system for knowing self and others.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Experiment 1 compared autistic and IQ-matched neurotypical youths on implicit (gambling) and explicit (confidence) metacognition tasks; Experiments 2 and 3 randomly assigned neurotypical adults to single-task or dual-task conditions with a mindreading or non-mindreading secondary task.
- N
- No single N. Experiment 1: 25 autistic and 25 neurotypical children/adolescents. Experiment 2: 160 university students, 40 per task-by-condition cell. Experiment 3: two new groups of 31 adults doing the confidence task with a gender-judgment secondary task.
- Population
- Autistic and matched neurotypical children and adolescents (Experiment 1); neurotypical university students and community adults in the UK (Experiments 2-3)
- Outcome
- Metacognitive efficiency (M-ratio, meta-d' divided by d') on an explicit judgment-of-confidence task and an implicit gambling task; mindreading task scores
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Key findings
Autistic participants had lower metacognitive efficiency than neurotypical participants on the explicit confidence task but not on the gambling task. In neurotypical adults, doing a mindreading task at the same time lowered confidence-judgment accuracy but left gambling accuracy unaffected, with a Bayes factor supporting no effect on gambling. Gender-judgment secondary tasks did not reduce confidence accuracy, so the drop seemed specific to mindreading rather than to any extra load. Implicit and explicit task performance were uncorrelated, and explicit metacognition correlated modestly with one mindreading measure (the Animations task) but not with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.
Methodology
In Experiment 1, 25 autistic and 25 matched neurotypical children and adolescents made perceptual judgments (which patch is lighter or denser) and then either said whether they were confident (explicit metacognition) or chose a high- or low-risk bet (an implicit gambling task like those used with monkeys). In Experiment 2, 160 students did one of these tasks either alone or while simultaneously judging speakers' mental states from their voices. In Experiment 3, two new groups of 31 adults did the confidence task while judging only the speaker's gender, using either normal sentences or neutral sentences played in reverse word order.
Limitations
The group-by-task interaction in Experiment 1 was only just significant, and the samples were too small to reliably test correlations between metacognition and mindreading, as the authors acknowledge. The mindreading secondary task in Experiment 2 may simply have been harder or more demanding of working memory than the gender tasks in Experiment 3, so a general-load explanation is not fully ruled out. The results cannot exclude a version of the metacognition-is-prior view in which a metacognitive deficit causes the mindreading problems in autism. Finally, showing that humans can gamble accurately without metacognition does not prove that monkeys do the same, only that such tasks do not require it.
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