Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK; Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, UK; Mental Health, Ethics and Law Research Group, Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, Room 3.21, 16 De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Alexandra House, 17-19 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AZ, UK.
Cognition. 2023 Jun;235:105389. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105389. Epub 2023 Feb 9.
Metacognition refers to a capacity to reflect on and control other cognitive processes, commonly quantified as the extent to which confidence tracks objective performance. There is conflicting evidence about how "local" metacognition (monitoring of individual judgments) and "global" metacognition (estimates of self-performance) change across the lifespan. Additionally, the degree to which metacognition generalises across cognitive domains may itself change with age due to increased experience with one's own abilities. Using a gamified suite of performance-controlled memory and visual perception tasks, we measured local and global metacognition in an age-stratified sample of 304 healthy volunteers (18-83 years; N = 50 in each of 6 age groups). We calculated both local and global metrics of metacognition and quantified how and whether domain-generality changes with age. First-order task performance was stable across the age range. People's global self-performance estimates and local metacognitive bias decreased with age, indicating overall lower confidence in performance. In contrast, local metacognitive efficiency was spared in older age and remained correlated across the two cognitive domains. A stability of local metacognition indicates distinct mechanisms contributing to local and global metacognition. Our study reveals how local and global metacognition change across the lifespan and provide a benchmark against which disease-related changes in metacognition can be compared.
元认知是指对其他认知过程进行反思和控制的能力，通常通过信心与客观表现的吻合程度来量化。关于元认知在整个生命周期中是如何变化的，存在相互矛盾的证据，包括“局部”元认知（对个体判断的监测）和“全局”元认知（对自我表现的估计）。此外，由于对自身能力的经验增加，元认知在不同认知领域的通用性程度可能会随着年龄的增长而发生变化。我们使用一系列经过游戏化设计的、受表现控制的记忆和视觉感知任务，在一个按年龄分层的 304 名健康志愿者样本（18-83 岁；每组 50 人，共 6 个年龄组）中测量了局部和全局元认知。我们计算了元认知的局部和全局指标，并量化了其通用性如何以及是否随年龄而变化。首先，任务表现是稳定的，跨越了整个年龄范围。人们对自我表现的总体估计和局部元认知偏差随着年龄的增长而降低，这表明对表现的信心总体上较低。相比之下，在老年时，局部元认知效率得到了保护，并且在两个认知领域之间仍然相关。局部元认知的稳定性表明，不同的机制对局部和全局元认知都有贡献。我们的研究揭示了元认知在整个生命周期中的变化，并提供了一个基准，可以用来比较与疾病相关的元认知变化。
