Rosenbaum, David;
Glickman, Moshe;
Fleming, Stephen M;
Usher, Marius;
(2022)
The Cognition/Metacognition Trade-Off.
Psychological Science
10.1177/09567976211043428.
(In press).
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Abstract
Integration to boundary is an optimal decision algorithm that accumulates evidence until the posterior reaches a decision boundary, resulting in the fastest decisions for a target accuracy. Here, we demonstrated that this advantage incurs a cost in metacognitive accuracy (confidence), generating a cognition/metacognition trade-off. Using computational modeling, we found that integration to a fixed boundary results in less variability in evidence integration and thus reduces metacognitive accuracy, compared with a collapsing-boundary or a random-timer strategy. We examined how decision strategy affects metacognitive accuracy in three cross-domain experiments, in which 102 university students completed a free-response session (evidence terminated by the participant's response) and an interrogation session (fixed number of evidence samples controlled by the experimenter). In both sessions, participants observed a sequence of evidence and reported their choice and confidence. As predicted, the interrogation protocol (preventing integration to boundary) enhanced metacognitive accuracy. We also found that in the free-response sessions, participants integrated evidence to a collapsing boundary-a strategy that achieves an efficient compromise between optimizing choice and metacognitive accuracy.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Cognition/Metacognition Trade-Off |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/09567976211043428 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177%2F09567976211043428 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial 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: | computational models, decision confidence, decision-making, diffusion model, integration to boundary, judgment, metacognition, optimality, preregistered, reaction time |
| UCL classification: | 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 > Experimental Psychology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10146108 |
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