Differences in the detail: Metacognition is better for seen than sensed changes to visual scenes

Metacognition is the process by which we know what we know. Knowing has both declarative and sensed components. Differences exist in the information that moves to our conscious awareness and how it is synthesised with existing knowledge. The current study measured metacognition by extending a visual change detection paradigm that promoted explicit or implicit detection by either a local or global manipulation of a scene. A within-subjects design was used to investigate how 91 participants detected change and made metacognitive judgements. Cognitive modelling, based on confidence judgements, estimated the relative contributions of discrete and continuous cognitive processes to change detection, and to metacognition. Metacognition was sensitive to both the discrete and continuous processes underlying change detection, but was more sensitive to the discrete process. These results demonstrate that metacognition attunes confidence differentially to explicit and implicit processes, and support direct-access theories for discrete processing and meta-representation theories for continuous processing.