Topic
Metacognition research, explained
19 open-access metacognition studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Does knowing how well you're doing improve during adolescence?
The ability to judge accurately when you are right or wrong improved with age across adolescence and then levelled off in adulthood, even though task performance itself was held constant.
- 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.
- Does our ability to judge our own performance decline as we age?
While older adults can perform visual tasks just as accurately as younger adults, their ability to judge the accuracy of their own decisions decreases over time.
- Are We More Accurate at Judging Future or Past Decisions?
People are significantly better at judging the accuracy of their decisions after they have made them compared to beforehand.
- Can people know they are right when they are guessing?
People can accurately judge whether their decisions are correct even when their overall decision accuracy is completely at chance.
- Does our self-awareness change as we grow older?
As people age, their overall confidence in their performance decreases, but their actual ability to evaluate individual decisions remains just as accurate.
- Do beliefs about worrying come before anxiety, or after?
Unhelpful beliefs about one's own thinking predicted later anxiety a month on, and anxiety also predicted later beliefs, but neither was linked over time with depression in this low-symptom sample.
- Do we read our own minds with the same system we use for others?
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.
- How does visual uncertainty affect our confidence in what we see?
When people fail to notice an object due to a temporary lapse in attention, they are better at evaluating their own mistake than when the object is physically blurred.
- Do older adults know when their memory is right?
Older adults remembered less than younger adults but judged the accuracy of their own memories just as well, and both groups' confidence was more informative for remembered word pairs than for single words.
- Do we know how well we judge pain as well as we judge sight?
People's confidence tracked the accuracy of their pain judgements just as well as for vision and warmth, but a person's skill at judging their own pain decisions was unrelated to their skill for vision.
- Does insomnia therapy fix how people think about their thinking?
Group CBT for insomnia improved sleep and sleep beliefs for everyone, but most patients still had problematic beliefs about their own thinking afterwards.
- Do doctors know when they don't understand statistics?
Medical students and doctors often got basic statistics wrong while feeling sure they were right, and their most common error on a diagnostic-test problem was made with as much confidence as correct answers.
- Does expecting a clear signal make you feel more sure?
When people expected a strong visual signal, they felt more confident and saw identical moving dots as clearer, even though they were no more accurate.
- Do beliefs about your own worrying predict relationship problems?
Students' beliefs about their own thinking, especially that worry is uncontrollable and dangerous, predicted how many interpersonal problems they reported even after accounting for mood, attachment style and personality.
- Does rumination lead to worry, or worry to rumination?
In students with strong unhelpful beliefs about their own thinking, rumination predicted more worry three months later, but worry did not predict later rumination.
- Do child witnesses' confidence levels show how accurate they are?
Despite legal beliefs that child eyewitnesses are unreliable, older children can use confidence ratings to signal the accuracy of their identifications.
- How do people weigh evidence when judging their own confidence?
When deciding whether a faint signal was present at all, people were paradoxically put off by extra evidence in the non-target location, the mirror image of the known bias to feel more confident in discrimination whenever overall evidence is high.
- Does psychosis weaken memory, confidence judgments or effort?
People with psychosis or more psychotic-like experiences remembered shapes less precisely, but they judged their own memory accurately and put as much effort into searching as everyone else.