Lee Alan L F, Ruby Eugene, Giles Nathan, Lau Hakwan
Department of Applied Psychology, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2018 Dec 4;9:2464. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02464. eCollection 2018.
An important yet unresolved question is whether or not metacognition consists of domain-general or domain-specific mechanisms. While most studies on this topic suggest a dissociation between metacognitive abilities at the neural level, there are inconsistent reports at the behavioral level. Specifically, while McCurdy et al. (2013) found a positive correlation between metacognitive efficiency for visual perception and memory, such correlation was not observed in Baird et al. (2013). One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that the former included two-alternative-forced choice (2AFC) judgments in both their visual and memory tasks, whereas the latter used 2AFC for one task and yes/no (YN) judgments for the other. To test the effect of task on cross-domain association in metacognitive efficiency, we conducted two online experiments to mirror McCurdy et al. (2013) and Baird et al. (2013) with considerable statistical power ( = 100), and replicated the main findings of both studies. The results suggest that the use of task could affect cross-domain association in metacognitive efficiency. In the third experiment with the same sample size, we used YN judgments for both tasks and did not find a significant cross-domain correlation in metacognitive efficiency. This suggests that the cross-domain correlation found in McCurdy et al. (2013) was not simply due to the same task being used for both domains, and the absence of cross-domain correlation in Baird et al. (2013) might be due to the use of YN judgments. Our results highlight the importance of avoiding confusion between 2AFC and YN judgments in behavioral tasks for metacognitive research, which is a common problem in many behavioral studies.
一个重要但尚未解决的问题是，元认知是由领域通用机制还是领域特定机制构成。虽然关于这一主题的大多数研究表明，元认知能力在神经层面存在分离，但在行为层面的报告并不一致。具体而言，虽然麦柯迪等人（2013年）发现视觉感知和记忆的元认知效率之间存在正相关，但贝尔德等人（2013年）并未观察到这种相关性。对此差异的一种可能解释是，前者在视觉和记忆任务中都采用了二选一强制选择（2AFC）判断，而后者在一项任务中使用了2AFC，在另一项任务中使用了是/否（YN）判断。为了测试任务对元认知效率跨领域关联的影响，我们进行了两项在线实验，以相当大的统计效力（=100）模仿麦柯迪等人（2013年）和贝尔德等人（2013年）的研究，并重复了两项研究的主要发现。结果表明，任务的使用可能会影响元认知效率的跨领域关联。在第三个样本量相同的实验中，我们在两项任务中都使用了YN判断，并未发现元认知效率存在显著的跨领域相关性。这表明，麦柯迪等人（2013年）发现的跨领域相关性并非仅仅由于两个领域都使用了相同的任务，而贝尔德等人（2013年）未发现跨领域相关性可能是由于使用了YN判断。我们的结果强调了在元认知研究的行为任务中避免2AFC和YN判断混淆的重要性，这是许多行为研究中常见的问题。
