The influence of cognitive conflict on metacognitive judgments

Both metacognition and cognitive control are thought to monitor and control other cognitive processes, but their exact functional relationship remains a matter of debate. Here, in two experiments we tested the impact of cognitive conflict on performance, reported confidence in response accuracy, reported difficulty of decision-making, and reported error awareness in a multi-response Stroop task in order to examine whether and how metacognitive judgments are informed by the effects of performance monitoring. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the effect of cognitive conflict on confidence depended on response accuracy: for correct responses, confidence was lower in the conflict condition than in the congruent condition but did not differ significantly from the neutral condition, whereas for erroneous responses, confidence was higher in the conflict condition than in both the congruent and neutral conditions. The results of Experiment 2 showed that cognitive conflict increased perceived decision difficulty, whereas the effect of the number of eligible responses was non-monotonic, with difficulty highest when two responses were eligible. These findings suggest that metacognitive judgments are associated with certain aspects of the performance monitoring function of cognitive control.