Estimating self-performance when making complex decisions

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Behavioral Economics

Background:

• Metacognition, the ability to monitor one's own mental states, is crucial for decision-making.
• Self-performance estimates (SPEs) are a key component of metacognition, particularly in complex tasks.
• Understanding how SPEs are formed in complex decisions is an under-researched area.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how task difficulty and feedback influence SPEs in complex economic decision-making.
• To compare metacognitive processes in complex economic decisions with those in simple perceptual decisions.
• To elucidate the mechanisms underlying SPE construction in cognitively demanding scenarios.

Main Methods:

• Participants engaged in cognitively complex economic decision-making and simple perceptual decision-making tasks.
• Task difficulty and the presence or absence of feedback were systematically varied.
• Objective performance and self-performance estimates (SPEs) were recorded and analyzed.

Main Results:

• Objective performance was influenced by task difficulty but not by feedback in both decision types.
• In complex economic decisions, SPEs were lower without feedback only in easy trials.
• In simple perceptual decisions, SPEs were lower without feedback in both easy and hard trials.

Conclusions:

• Metacognitive estimation of performance in complex economic decisions differs for easy and hard trials.
• Distinct metacognitive mechanisms appear to be employed for evaluating performance in varying task complexities.
• Feedback's impact on SPEs is contingent on both task complexity and difficulty.