Guggenmos Matthias
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, Berlin 10117, Germany.
Neurosci Conscious. 2021 Nov 25;2021(1):niab040. doi: 10.1093/nc/niab040. eCollection 2021.
Research on metacognition-thinking about thinking-has grown rapidly and fostered our understanding of human cognition in healthy individuals and clinical populations. Of central importance is the concept of metacognitive performance, which characterizes the capacity of an individual to estimate and report the accuracy of primary (type 1) cognitive processes or actions ensuing from these processes. Arguably one of the biggest challenges for measures of metacognitive performance is their dependency on objective type 1 performance, although more recent methods aim to address this issue. The present work scrutinizes the most popular metacognitive performance measures in terms of two critical characteristics: independence of type 1 performance and test-retest reliability. Analyses of data from the Confidence Database (total = 6912) indicate that no current metacognitive performance measure is independent of type 1 performance. The shape of this dependency is largely reproduced by extending current models of metacognition with a source of metacognitive noise. Moreover, the reliability of metacognitive performance measures is highly sensitive to the combination of type 1 performance and trial number. Importantly, trial numbers frequently employed in metacognition research are too low to achieve an acceptable level of test-retest reliability. Among common task characteristics, simultaneous choice and confidence reports most strongly improved reliability. Finally, general recommendations about design choices and analytical remedies for studies investigating metacognitive performance are provided.
关于元认知（即对思维的思考）的研究发展迅速，增进了我们对健康个体和临床人群中人类认知的理解。元认知表现的概念至关重要，它描述了个体评估和报告初级（1型）认知过程或由这些过程产生的行为准确性的能力。尽管最近的方法旨在解决这一问题，但元认知表现测量面临的最大挑战之一可能是它们对客观1型表现的依赖性。本研究从两个关键特征：1型表现的独立性和重测信度，仔细审查了最常用的元认知表现测量方法。对来自信心数据库（总计6912个）的数据进行分析表明，目前没有一种元认知表现测量方法独立于1型表现。通过用元认知噪声源扩展当前的元认知模型，很大程度上再现了这种依赖性的形式。此外，元认知表现测量的信度对1型表现和试验次数的组合高度敏感。重要的是，元认知研究中经常使用的试验次数过低，无法达到可接受的重测信度水平。在常见的任务特征中，同时进行选择和信心报告最能有效提高信度。最后，针对研究元认知表现的研究，提供了关于设计选择和分析补救措施的一般建议。
