Abstract
Adaptive behavior depends on the ability to accurately introspect about one’s own performance. Whether this metacognitive ability is supported by the same mechanisms across different tasks is an open question that has thus far been investigated with a focus on correlating metacognitive accuracy between perceptual and long-term memory paradigms. Here, we investigated the relationship between metacognition of visual perception and metacognition of visual short-term memory (VSTM), a cognitive function thought to be more intimately related to visual processing. Across two experiments that required subjects to estimate the perceived or remembered orientation of a grating stimulus and rate their confidence, we observed strong positive correlations between individual differences in metacognitive accuracy between the two tasks. This relationship was not accounted for by individual differences in task performance or average confidence, and was present across two different metrics of metacognition and in both experiments. In contrast to previous results comparing perception and long-term memory, which have largely provided evidence for domain-specific metacognitive processes, the current findings suggest that metacognition of visual perception and VSTM is supported by a domain-general metacognitive architecture.
Footnotes
The Authors declare no conflicts of interest