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Trait anxiety does not correlate with metacognitive confidence or reminder usage in a delayed intentions task

Kirk, PA; Robinson, O; Gilbert, S; (2020) Trait anxiety does not correlate with metacognitive confidence or reminder usage in a delayed intentions task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 10.1177/1747021820970156. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Setting external reminders provides a convenient way to reduce cognitive demand and ensure accurate retrieval of information for prospective tasks. Recent experimental evidence has demonstrated that the decision to offload cognitive information to external resources is guided by metacognitive belief, i.e. individuals’ confidence in their unaided ability. Other work has also suggested a relationship between metacognitive belief and trait anxiety. In the present study (N=300), we bridged these two areas by investigating whether trait anxiety correlated with metacognitive belief — and consequently — propensity to offload information in a delayed intentions paradigm. Participants received a financial reward based on their ability to remember targets. However, participants could take a reduced reward per target if they decided to use reminders. We replicated previous findings that participants were biased to use more reminders than would be optimal, and this bias was correlated with metacognitive judgements. However, we show no evidence that trait anxiety held a relationship with metacognitive belief or reminder usage. Indeed, Bayesian analyses strongly favoured the null. Therefore, variation in self-reported trait anxiety does not necessarily influence confidence and strategy when participants remember delayed intentions.

Type: Article
Title: Trait anxiety does not correlate with metacognitive confidence or reminder usage in a delayed intentions task
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1177/1747021820970156
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021820970156
Language: English
Additional information: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Keywords: anxiety, memory, metacognition
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10113592
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