Judgments of agency are affected by sensory noise without recruiting metacognitive processing

Judgments of agency, our sense of control over our actions and the environment, are often assumed to be metacognitive. We examined this assumption at the computational level by comparing the effects of sensory noise on agency judgments to those on confidence judgements, which are widely accepted to be metacognitive in nature. In two tasks, participants rated agency, or confidence in a decision about their agency, over a virtual hand that tracked their movements, either synchronously or with a delay, under high and low noise. We compared the predictions of two computational models to participants’ ratings and found that agency ratings, unlike confidence, were best explained by a model involving no metacognitive noise estimates. We propose that agency judgments reflect first-order measures of the internal signal, without involving metacognitive computations, challenging the assumed link between the two cognitive processes.

Metacognitive processing in non-native language perception and production

Metacognition is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognition and behaviour. However, the role of metacognition in language remains poorly understood. Here we investigated metacognitive processing in non-native language perception and production, by asking participants to rate, on a trial-by-trial basis, their self-confidence in the accuracy in a phoneme identification and production task. The results revealed metacognitive ability in perception, as participants' confidence judgments aligned with the accuracy in the non-native speech discrimination task. In the production task, self-confidence did not align with a fine-grained precision measure of one’s own production - indexed by Mahalanobis distance to the target-vowel native space. However, self-confidence ratings predicted whether one’s production was within/outside the ‘native’ zone, suggesting that metacognitive monitoring in non-native language production operates on relatively coarse, yet meaningful sound level representations. While overall confidence ratings were similar and highly correlated between the perception and production tasks, there were no associations between the two language domains regarding the primary task performance or metacognitive ability. We discuss the ramifications of these findings for domain-generality/specificity in metacognitive processing in non-native language, and the unsettled debate on the relationship between language perception and production. Finally, we note future research directions that emerge from the present work.

Toward a Neurocognitive Understanding of the Algorithms That Underlie Metamemory Judgments

Neurocognitive research on metamemory thus far has mostly focused on localizing brain regions that track metacognitive judgments and distinguishing metacognitive processing from primary cognition. With much known about the localization of metamemory in the brain, there is a growing opportunity to develop a more algorithmic characterization of the brain processes underlying metamemory. We briefly review some current neurocognitive metamemory research, including relevant brain regions and theories about their role in metamemory. We review some computational neuroimaging approaches and, as an illustrative example, describe their use in studies on the delayed-JOL (judgments of learning) effect. Finally, we discuss how researchers might apply computational approaches to several unresolved questions in the behavioral metamemory literature. Such research could provide a bridge between cognitive and neurocognitive research on metamemory and provide novel insights into the algorithms underlying metamemory judgments, thus informing theory and methodology in both areas.

Developmental trajectories of metacognitive processing and executive function from childhood to older age

The modern understanding of the term metacognition encompasses two levels of processing: a lower level awareness or knowledge of one’s own thoughts and a higher level regulation or control of our thinking. Metacognition, therefore, bears conceptual similarity with executive function: both are concerned with top-down monitoring and control of cognition in the service of ongoing goal-directed behaviour. Previous studies have shown a possible executive function advantage in multilingual speakers but also a possible disadvantage in metacognitive processing. To progress theory on metacognitive processing and the relationship with executive function and linguistic experience across the lifespan, we conducted a study testing 330 healthy individuals in four age groups from 7 to 80 years old. All participants performed a metacognition task and two measures of executive function, which included the Simon task and the Tower of London task. Half the participants were multilingual speakers since birth. We built developmental trajectories of metacognitive and executive function across the lifespan. The best metacognitive efficiency was observed in mid-adulthood, whereas the best executive function processing reached its peak in young adulthood. A steep cognitive decline was observed in older age, while metacognitive efficiency was preserved. Exploratory factor analysis indicated that metacognition and executive function are served by different factors across all ages. Contrary to previous findings in the bilingual literature, a multilinguistic experience conferred neither any significant advantage nor disadvantage in both executive function and metacognitive processing across the lifespan.

A Mixed-Method Case Study: Is there Only the Pictorial Input that Affects Word Retention?

This mixed-method case study was conducted to probe how a set of pictures had an influence on a group of EFL university students’ retention of English words. Seven Thai university participants, enrolling in the course of English for Service Industry, were voluntarily engaged in the study. They took a pretest of 45 words they learned in class through the use of pictorial input for one semester, and right after the posttest, they recalled how they could remember the words in an individually stimulated recall protocol session. The result of T-test from Wilcoxon sign-ranked test showed that the pretest and posttest scores were significantly different at the 0.05 level. Interestingly, the qualitative accounts from the stimulated recall revealed that apart from the pictorial input the participants learned in class, they also employed other strategies to help them memorize the vocabulary. The findings from the study; therefore, shed lights on cognitive-metacognitive processing and strategies an individual EFL learner adopted, and most importantly, on how teachers can encourage their learners to orchestrate them and make the best use of pictures in order to learn ESP vocabulary effectively.