Publications
Students With High Metacognition Are Favourable Towards Individualism When Anxious
Authors: Barrientos, M. S., Valenzuela, P., Hojman, V., & Reyes, G. (2022). Students With High Metacognition Are Favourable Towards Individualism When Anxious. Frontiers in Psychology, 2636.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.910132
Metacognitive ability has been described as an important predictor of several processes involved in learning, including problem-solving. Although this relationship is fairly documented, little is known about the mechanisms that could modulate it. We decided to evaluate the impact of self-knowledge on problem-solving and, in addition, we inspected whether emotional (self-reported anxiety) and interpersonal (attitudes towards social interdependence) variables could affect the relationship between metacognition and problem-solving. We tested a sample of 32 undergraduate students and used behavioural tasks and self-report questionnaires. Contrary to the literature, we found no significant relationship between metacognition and problem-solving performance, nor a significant moderating effect when including emotional and interpersonal variables in the model. In contrast, we observed a significant moderating model combining metacognition, self-reported anxiety and attitudes towards social interdependence. It was found that participants with high metacognition reported attitudes unfavourable towards interdependence when they felt high anxiety. These results suggest that already anxious individuals with high metacognition would prefer to work alone rather than with others, as a coping mechanism against further anxiety derived from cooperation. We hypothesise that in anxiogenic contexts, metacognition is used as a tool to compare possible threats with one’s own skills and act accordingly, in order to maximise one’s own performance. Further studies are needed to understand how metacognition works in contexts adverse to learning.
Consensus goals for the field of visual metacognition
Authors: Rahnev, D., Balsdon, T., Charles, L., de Gardelle, V., Denison, R., Desender, K., Faivre, N., Filevich, E., Fleming, S. M., Jehee, J., Lau, H., Lee, A. L. F., Locke, S. M., Mamassian, P., Odegaard, B., Peters, M., Reyes, G., Rouault, M., Sackur, J., Samaha, J., … Zylberberg, A. (2022). Consensus Goals in the Field of Visual Metacognition. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 17(6), 1746–1765.
DOI : 10.31234/osf.io/z8v5x
Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, the discipline still trails other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across disciplines, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term goals for our field. We describe the process that we followed, the goals themselves, and our plans for accomplishing these goals. If the next few years prove this effort successful, such consensus-building around common goals could be adopted more widely in psychological science.
Listeners perception of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a commonprosodic signature
Authors: Goupil, L., Ponsot, E., Richardson, D., Reyes, G., & Aucouturier, J. J. (2021). Listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature. Nature communications, 12(1), 861.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20649-4
The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words.
The confidence database
Authors: Rahnev, D., Desender, K., Lee, A. L., Adler, W. T., Aguilar-Lleyda, D., Akdoğan, B., Arbuzova, P., Atlas, L., Balci, F., Bang, J., Bègue, I., Birney, D., Brady, T., Calder-Travis, J., Chetverikov, A., Clark, T., Davranche, K., Denison, R., Dildine, T., … & Zylberberg, A. (2020). The confidence database. Nature human behaviour, 4(3), 317-325.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0813-1
Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages. Each dataset is accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database contained 145 datasets with data from more than 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials.
Biological stress reactivity and introspective sensitivity: An exploratory study
Authors: Barrientos, M., Tapia, L., Silva, J. R., & Reyes, G. (2020). Biological stress reactivity and introspective sensitivity: an exploratory study. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 543.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00543
It is well established that reaction to stressful events is highly variable among individuals, with an impact on several cognitive processes, such as memory, attention and perception. However, whether individuals sensitivity to stress is related to their introspective performance is still unclear. Here we investigated whether biological reactivity to stress is related to how individuals evaluate their own cognitive processes (introspection). Through hormone measures (cortisol concentration in saliva), we quantified the intensity of the stress response in 27 healthy individuals. Then, using a visual search paradigm we investigated introspective capacity. On a trial-by-trial basis, we evaluated three introspective measures: confidence level, subjective response time (introspective response time; iRT) and the subjective estimation of attentional shifts (subjective number of scanned items; SNSI) during a perceptual decision task. Results suggest that biological reactivity to stress predicts lower sensitivity in introspection. In short, highly stress-reactive individuals are poor introspectors.
Role of feedback on metacognitive training
Authors: de Gardelle, V., Faivre, N., Filevich, E., Reyes, G., Rouy, M., Sackur, J., & Vergnaud, J. C. (2020). Role of feedback on metacognitive training.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.3138
This study follows up on previous work by Carpenter and colleagues (Carpenter, J., Sherman, M. T., Kievit, R. A., Seth, A. K., Lau, H., & Fleming, S. M. (2019). Domain-general enhancements of metacognitive ability through adaptive training. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 148(1), 51–64), who argued that metacognitive performance can be improved through adaptive training. In the study by Carpenter et al, two key issues (namely, inconsistencies in the instructions provided to participants and problems in the reward regime) are sufficient to explain the apparent training effects reported. In this study we aim at replicating the experiment (which was originally conducted online with participants recruited via MTurk) addressing these two issues. This will clarify the role of feedback on metacognitive training, and provide evidence for either the existence or absence of training effects. The question of wether metacognitive ability can be trained (and if so, how) is one of the central questions in the field of metacognition, as it may inform interventions to improve learning processes in different fields such as education sports, and even psychiatric conditions.
Hydrocortisone decreases metacognitive efficiency independent of percieved stress
Authors: Reyes, G., Reyes, G., Vivanco-Carlevari, A., Medina, F., Manosalva, C., De Gardelle, V., Sackur, J., & Silva, J. R. (2020). Hydrocortisone decreases metacognitive efficiency independent of perceived stress. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 14100.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71061-3
It is well established that acute stress produces negative effects on high level cognitive functions. However, these effects could be due to the physiological components of the stress response (among which cortisol secretion is prominent), to its psychological concomitants (the thoughts generated by the stressor) or to any combination of those. Our study shows for the first time that the typical cortisol response to stress is sufficient to impair metacognition, that is the ability to monitor one’s own performance in a task. In a pharmacological protocol, we administered either 20 mg hydrocortisone or placebo to 46 male participants, and measured their subjective perception of stress, their performance in a perceptual task, and their metacognitive ability. We found that hydrocortisone selectively impaired metacognitive ability, without affecting task performance or creating a subjective state of stress.
Meditation Focused on self-observation of the body impairs metacognitive efficiency
Authors: Schmidt, C., Reyes, G., Barrientos, M., Langer, Á. I., & Sackur, J. (2019). Meditation focused on self-observation of the body impairs metacognitive efficiency. Consciousness and Cognition, 70, 116-125.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.03.001
In the last decade of research on metacognition, the literature has been focused on understanding its mechanism, function and scope; however, little is known about whether metacognitive capacity can be trained. The specificity of the potential training procedure is in particular still largely unknown. In this study, we evaluate whether metacognition is trainable through generic meditation training, and if so, which component of meditation would be instrumental in this improvement. To this end, we evaluated participants’ metacognitive efficiency before and after two types of meditation training protocols: the first focused on mental cues (Mental Monitoring [MM] training), whereas the second focused on body cues (Self-observation of the Body [SoB] training). Results indicated that while metacognitive efficiency was stable in MM training group, it was significantly reduced in the SoB group after training.
Introspection during short-term memory scanning
Authors: Reyes, G., & Sackur, J. (2018). Introspection during short-term memory scanning. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(10), 2088-2100.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021817738951
The literature in metacognition has argued for many years that introspective access to our own mental content is restricted to the cognitive states associated with the response to a task, such as the level of confidence in a decision or the estimation of the response time; however, the cognitive processes that underlie such states were deemed inaccessible to participants’ consciousness. Here, we ask whether participants could introspectively distinguish the cognitive processes that underlie two short-term memory tasks. For this purpose, we asked participants, on a trial-by-trial basis, to report the number of items that they mentally scanned during their short-term memory retrieval, which we have named “subjective number of scanned items.” The subjective number of scanned items index was evaluated, in Experiment 1, immediately after a judgment of recency task and, in Experiment 2, after an item recognition task. Finally, in Experiment 3, both tasks were randomly mixed. The results showed that participants’ introspection successfully accessed the complexity of the decisional processes.
Introspective access to implicit shifts of attention
Authors: Reyes, G., & Sackur, J. (2017). Introspective access to implicit shifts of attention. Consciousness and cognition, 48, 11-20.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.10.003
Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access to complex cognitive processes. This situation derives from the difficulty of experimentally manipulating cognitive processes while abiding by the two contradictory constraints. First, participants must not be aware of the experimental manipulation, otherwise they run the risk of incorporating their knowledge of the experimental manipulation in some rational elaboration. Second, we need an external, third person perspective evidence that the experimental manipulation did impact some relevant cognitive processes. Here, we study introspection during visual searches, and we try to overcome the above dilemma, by presenting a barely visible, “pre-conscious” cue just before the search array. We aim at influencing the attentional guidance of the search processes, while participants would not notice that fact. Results show that introspection of the complexity of a search process is driven in part by subjective access to its attentional guidance.