Reporting confidence decreases response and change-of-mind accuracy in a perceptual decision task

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Metacognition
• Perceptual decision-making

Background:

• Self-monitoring is vital for regulatory behavior, but its impact on simple cognitive tasks is debated.
• Some research indicates enhanced metacognitive regulation and performance with increased monitoring, while other studies suggest impairment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if reporting confidence in perceptual decisions influences metacognitive regulation and response accuracy.
• To determine the effects of different confidence reporting timings on cognitive task performance.

Main Methods:

• Participants completed a visual discrimination task with initial and final responses.
• Conditions varied confidence reporting (simultaneous or retrospective), an additional task, or a blank screen interval.
• Three experiments were conducted to assess the impact of these variations.

Main Results:

• No evidence was found that confidence ratings improve regulatory processing or perceptual task performance.
• Retrospective confidence ratings led to smaller final response improvements and less corrective "changes of mind" compared to controls.
• Simultaneous confidence ratings generally decreased accuracy.

Conclusions:

• Deliberate monitoring, such as confidence reporting, may impose an additional cognitive load.
• This cognitive strain can potentially impair lower-order task processing and reduce overall performance.
• The findings challenge the assumption that explicit monitoring universally benefits cognitive tasks.