Polyanskaya Leona
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Göttingen, Germany.
CIBIT-Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research, Coimbra, Portugal.
Front Psychol. 2023 Feb 23;14:1128200. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1128200. eCollection 2023.
Metacognition-the ability of individuals to monitor one's own cognitive performance and decisions-is often studied empirically based on the retrospective confidence ratings. In experimental research, participants are asked to report how sure they are in their response, or to report how well their performance in high-level cognitive or low-level perceptual tasks is. These retrospective confidence ratings are used as a measure of monitoring effectiveness: larger difference in confidence ratings assigned to correct and incorrect responses reflects better ability to estimate the likelihood of making an error by an experiment participant, or better metacognitive monitoring ability. We discuss this underlying assumption and provide some methodological consideration that might interfere with interpretation of results, depending on what is being asked to evaluate, how the confidence response is elicited, and the overall proportion of different trial types within one experimental session. We conclude that mixing trials on which decision confidence is assigned when positive evidence needs to be evaluated and the trials on which absence of positive evidence needs to be evaluated should be avoided. These considerations might be important when designing experimental work to explore metacognitive efficiency using retrospective confidence ratings.
元认知——个体监控自身认知表现和决策的能力——通常基于回顾性信心评级进行实证研究。在实验研究中，参与者被要求报告他们对自己的回答有多大把握，或者报告他们在高级认知或低级感知任务中的表现如何。这些回顾性信心评级被用作监控有效性的指标：分配给正确和错误回答的信心评级之间的差异越大，表明实验参与者估计犯错可能性的能力越强，或者元认知监控能力越好。我们讨论了这一潜在假设，并提供了一些方法上的考虑因素，这些因素可能会干扰结果的解释，具体取决于被要求评估的内容、信心反应的引出方式以及一个实验环节中不同试验类型的总体比例。我们得出结论，应避免将需要评估正面证据时分配决策信心的试验与需要评估缺乏正面证据的试验混合在一起。在设计使用回顾性信心评级来探索元认知效率的实验工作时，这些考虑因素可能很重要。
