AUTHOR=Lee Alan L. F. , Ruby Eugene , Giles Nathan , Lau Hakwan 

TITLE=Cross-Domain Association in Metacognitive Efficiency Depends on First-Order Task Types

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=9

YEAR=2018

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02464

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02464

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>An important yet unresolved question is whether or not metacognition consists of domain-general or domain-specific mechanisms. While most studies on this topic suggest a dissociation between metacognitive abilities at the neural level, there are inconsistent reports at the behavioral level. Specifically, while McCurdy et al. (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B20">2013</xref>) found a positive correlation between metacognitive efficiency for visual perception and memory, such correlation was not observed in Baird et al. (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B2">2013</xref>). One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that the former included two-alternative-forced choice (2AFC) judgments in both their visual and memory tasks, whereas the latter used 2AFC for one task and yes/no (YN) judgments for the other. To test the effect of task on cross-domain association in metacognitive efficiency, we conducted two online experiments to mirror McCurdy et al. (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B20">2013</xref>) and Baird et al. (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B2">2013</xref>) with considerable statistical power (<italic>n</italic> = 100), and replicated the main findings of both studies. The results suggest that the use of task could affect cross-domain association in metacognitive efficiency. In the third experiment with the same sample size, we used YN judgments for both tasks and did not find a significant cross-domain correlation in metacognitive efficiency. This suggests that the cross-domain correlation found in McCurdy et al. (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B20">2013</xref>) was not simply due to the same task being used for both domains, and the absence of cross-domain correlation in Baird et al. (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B2">2013</xref>) might be due to the use of YN judgments. Our results highlight the importance of avoiding confusion between 2AFC and YN judgments in behavioral tasks for metacognitive research, which is a common problem in many behavioral studies.</p>