Adaptive curiosity about metacognitive ability.

Metacognition provides control and oversight to the process of acquiring and using knowledge. Efficient metacognition is essential to many aspects of daily life, from health care to finance and education. Across three experiments, we found a specific form of curiosity in humans about the quality of their own metacognition, using a novel approach that dissociates perceptual from metacognitive information searches.

Learning to discriminate the eye-of-origin during continuous flash suppression.

Helmholtz asked whether one could discriminate which eye is the origin of one's perception merely based on the retinal signals. Studies to date showed that participants' ability to tell the eye-of-origin most likely depends on contextual cues. Nevertheless, it has been shown that exogenous attention can enhance performance for monocularly presented stimuli.

Common computations for metacognition and meta-metacognition.

Recent evidence shows that people have the meta-metacognitive ability to evaluate their metacognitive judgments of confidence. However, it is unclear whether meta-metacognitive judgments are made by a different system and rely on a separate set of computations compared to metacognitive judgments. To address this question, we asked participants ( = 36) to perform a perceptual decision-making task and provide (i) an object-level, Type-1 response about the identity of the stimulus; (ii) a metacognitive, Type-2 response (low/high) regarding their confidence in their Type-1 decision; and (iii) a meta-metacognitive, Type-3 response (low/high) regarding the quality of their Type-2 rating.

Metacognition tracks sensitivity following involuntary shifts of visual attention.

Salient, exogenous cues have been shown to induce a temporary boost of perceptual sensitivity in their immediate vicinity. In two experiments involving uninformative exogenous cues presented at various times before a target stimulus, we investigated whether human observers (N = 100) were able to monitor the involuntary increase in performance induced by such transients. We found that an increase of perceptual sensitivity (in a choice task) and encoding precision (in a free-estimation task) occurred approximately 100 ms after cue onset, and was accompanied by an increase in confidence about the perceptual response.

Confidence at the limits of human nested cognition.

Metacognition is the ability to weigh the quality of our own cognition, such as the confidence that our perceptual decisions are correct. Here we ask whether metacognitive performance can itself be evaluated or else metacognition is the ultimate reflective human faculty. Building upon a classic visual perception task, we show that human observers are able to produce nested, above-chance judgements on the quality of their decisions at least up to the fourth order (i.

Metacognitive blindness in temporal selection during the deployment of spatial attention.

How does orienting attention in space affect the quality of our confidence judgments? Orienting attention to a particular location is known to boost visual performance, but the deployment of attention is far from being instantaneous. Whether observers are able to monitor the time needed for attention to deploy remains largely unknown. To address this question, we adapted a "Wundt clocks" paradigm, asking observers (N=140) to reproduce the phase of a rotating clock at the time of an attentional cue, and to evaluate their confidence in their responses.

The Confidence Database.

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.

Temporal attention causes systematic biases in visual confidence.

Temporal attention enhances the perceptual representation of a stimulus at a particular point in time. The number of possible attentional episodes in a given period is limited, but whether observers' confidence reflects such limitations is still unclear. To investigate this issue, we adapted an "Attentional Blink" paradigm, presenting observers with a rapid visual stream of letters containing two targets cued for subsequent perceptual reports and confidence judgments.