Prospective and retrospective awareness of moment-to-moment fluctuations in visual working memory performance

Visual working memory (VWM) performance fluctuates from moment to moment with occasional failures in maintaining accurate information in mind. While previous research suggests that individuals tend to be overconfident in their VWM performance during these failures, no study to date has examined whether individuals can predict upcoming reductions in VWM performance. To test the accuracy of both prospective and retrospective awareness on VWM performance, we developed a VWM bet task in which participants made trial-by-trial bets on their upcoming VWM performance prior to viewing a memory array of colored squares, followed by color reports paired with confidence ratings at test. Across two experiments (N = 87; N = 85), we demonstrate that retrospective awareness is more sensitive to VWM performance fluctuations than prospective awareness in young adults, though both metacognitive abilities are imperfect. Poor metacognitive abilities reflected a general tendency-particularly among low VWM capacity individuals-to overestimate upcoming VWM performance. When individuals overestimated their upcoming VWM performance (i.e., prospective failures), VWM performance significantly reduced compared to the preceding trials of a prospective failure. Moreover, this reduction in performance significantly lingered into subsequent trials. However, individuals' prospective and retrospective awareness better aligned to VWM performance after a prospective failure. This postfailure calibration occurred even without feedback signaling a prospective failure (Experiment 2), suggesting a metacognitive efficiency in recognizing the initial overestimation. Taken together, our results suggest that individuals, particularly low-capacity individuals, have a limited awareness toward upcoming VWM performance but exhibit metacognitive adjustments immediately following a prospective failure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).