Intention offloading: Domain-general versus task-specific confidence signals

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Metacognition
• Decision Making

Background:

• Intention offloading involves using external reminders for future intentions, like medication alerts.
• Metacognition, particularly confidence, influences intention offloading decisions, independent of cognitive ability.
• The cross-domain organization of metacognitive influences on intention offloading requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the relationship between perceptual confidence and intention offloading across different cognitive domains.
• To investigate whether individual differences in confidence predict both the likelihood and strategy of intention offloading.
• To determine if metacognitive signals influencing offloading are domain-general or task-specific.

Main Methods:

• Participants completed perceptual discrimination tasks with accuracy standardized using a staircase procedure.
• Two measures of intention offloading were assessed in a subsequent memory task: reminder setting likelihood and bias.
• Objective accuracy and confidence judgments were recorded during perceptual tasks.

Main Results:

• Perceptual confidence positively correlated with the overall likelihood of setting reminders.
• Perceptual confidence did not correlate with the bias in reminder-setting strategy.
• Individual differences in confidence reflected objective ability, even after performance equalization via staircasing.

Conclusions:

• Intention offloading is shaped by both general and specific metacognitive signals.
• Confidence differences reflect objective ability, complicating their use as a pure measure of metacognitive bias.
• Metacognitive influences on intention offloading are complex and domain-dependent.