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Sketchpad Series

How Does Task Structure Impact Metacognitive Judgment?

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Tanvi Palsamudram¹ (tanvi_palsamudram@brown.edu), Haley Keglovits¹, David Badre¹; ¹Brown University

Metacognition is the knowledge and regulation of one’s own cognition. An open question concerns how people judge their own performance on a task, even prior to performing it, and what aspects of task structure affect those judgments. Prior research suggests that people perceive cognitive control tasks requiring higher degrees of policy abstraction as being more effortful, and they will avoid them, even based only on instructions and even when performance is otherwise matched (Sayalı et al., 2023). Given that people use this aspect of task structure to predict effort independent from their actual performance, we asked whether this feature of task structure could also influence metacognitive judgments. We hypothesize that as a task’s policy abstraction increases, the accuracy of metacognitive judgments will decrease. Thirty participants completed established stimulus-response tasks (Badre and D’Esposito, 2007), which manipulate policy abstraction while controlling for load. Participant judgments of their performance and their confidence in these judgments were measured before and after each task. As policy abstraction increased, performance was more error prone and slow, matching the findings of previous studies. Further, participants’ judgment of their own performance improved with task experience. Nevertheless, preliminary findings showed an interaction between abstraction and pre- and post-diction of objective performance, such that as task abstraction increases, the accuracy of metacognitive judgments decreases, consistent with our hypothesis. Overall, the results suggest that metacognition is influenced by task structure, such as policy abstraction. These features contribute to human estimates of their own task performance, even before performing it.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other