Metacognition and meta-metacognition for common perceptual experiences

Humans have lifelong experience with their own perception, yet prior research shows that they often have remarkably poor metacognitive insight into how their perceptual systems work. However, it remains unknown whether people have the meta-metacognitive ability to evaluate their metacognitive beliefs about their own perception. Here, we examined people's metacognitive and meta-metacognitive insight for a large set of perceptual abilities. Participants (N = 200) completed a 43-item questionnaire covering common perceptual experiences and indicated their confidence in each response. We defined accurate beliefs about one's perception as evidence of metacognition, and confidence that distinguishes true from false beliefs as evidence of meta-metacognition. Overall, participants exhibited both metacognitive insight and meta-metacognitive ability to evaluate their own insight. However, six questions produced below-chance accuracy, indicating poor metacognition. These questions also exhibited chance-level or below-chance-level confidence-accuracy correlation, indicating poor meta-metacognition. Furthermore, confidence-accuracy correlation was at chance for over half of the questions, including many with above-chance accuracy. Finally, average confidence stayed roughly constant for the questions with poor-to-average accuracy, but closely followed performance for questions with above-average accuracy. These results reveal that people show excellent meta-metacognition for aspects of perception they understand well, but poor meta-metacognition for more challenging domains. Our results begin to reveal the limits of people's metacognitive and meta-metacognitive beliefs about their everyday perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).