Metacognitive accuracy across cognitive and physical task domains

Abstract

Metacognition is often considered a critical component of learning and higher-order cognition; however, does metacognitive accuracy remain constant across all tasks, specifically in tasks that involve physical or procedural components? To investigate the consistency of metacognitive judgments across various task types, participants completed word and number recall tasks, and also completed three simple physical skill tasks (e.g., catching a ball in a cup). Participants made metacognitive judgments about their performance in all tasks. Results indicated that while participants demonstrated traditional levels of relative metacognitive accuracy in more cognitive tasks, participants were significantly more accurate in their judgments for physical skill tasks. In other words, relative accuracy for metacognitive judgments in physical tasks appears to be significantly higher than for cognitive tasks. This represents the first such demonstration of this effect and suggests that characteristics of physical tasks somehow improve participants’ judgments of how well they have learned.