Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing 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,

We can make exquisitely precise movements without the apparent need for conscious monitoring. But can we monitor the low-level movement parameters when prompted? And what are the mechanisms that allow us to monitor our movements? To answer these questions, we designed a semivirtual ball throwing task. On each trial, participants first threw a virtual ball by moving their arm (with or without visual feedback, or replayed from a previous trial) and then made a two-alternative forced choice on the resulting ball trajectory. They then rated their confidence in their decision. We measured metacognitive efficiency using meta-d 0 /d 0 and compared it between different informational domains of the first-order task (motor, visuomotor or visual information alone), as well as between two different versions of the task based on different parameters of the movement: proximal (position of the arm) or distal (resulting trajectory of the ball thrown). We found that participants were able to monitor their performance based on distal motor information as well as when proximal information was available. Their metacognitive efficiency was also equally high in conditions with different sources of information available. The analysis of correlations across participants revealed an unexpected result: While metacognitive efficiency correlated between informational domains (which would indicate domain-generality of metacognition), it did not correlate across the different parameters of movement. We discuss possible sources of this discrepancy and argue that specific first-order task demands may play a crucial role in our metacognitive ability and should be considered when making inferences about domain-generality based on correlations.

were supported by DFG, German Research Foundation (project number 222641018 -SFB/TTR 135). Data, code and pre-registration protocols are available at https://osf.io/kyhu7/ (Experiment 1) and https://osf.io/sy342/ (Experiment 2). The data discussed in this article were first published in "The Confidence Database", https://osf.io/s46pr/ (Rahnev et al., 2020). We have no known conflict of interest to disclose. AbstractWe can make exquisitely precise movements without the apparent need for conscious monitoring.But can we monitor the low-level movement parameters when prompted? And what are the mechanisms that allow us to monitor our movements? To answer these questions, we designed a semi-virtual ball throwing task. On each trial, participants first threw a virtual ball by moving their arm (with or without visual feedback, or replayed from a previous trial) and then made a twoalternative forced choice on the resulting ball trajectory. They then rated their confidence in their decision. We measured metacognitive efficiency using meta-d'/d' and compared it between different informational domains of the first-order task (motor, visuomotor or visual information alone), as well as between two different versions of the task based on different parameters of the movement: proximal (position of the arm) or distal (resulting trajectory of the ball thrown).We found that participants were able to monitor their performance based on distal motor information as well as when proximal information was available. Their metacognitive efficiency was also equally high in conditions with different sources of information available. The analysis of correlations across participants revealed an unexpected result: while metacognitive efficiency correlated between informational domains (which would indicate domain-generality of metacognition), it did not correlate across the different parameters of movement. We discuss possible sources of this discrepancy and argue that specific first-order task demands may play a crucial role in our metacognitive ability and should be considered when making inferences about domain-generality based on correlations.

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. However, as in many other fields, progress has been slowed by the difficulty of collecting new data and the unavailability of existing data. To address this issue, 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 analyzed in multiple software packages. Each dataset is further accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (available at osf.io/s46pr) contained 145 datasets with data from over 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. We show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimation for several foundational confidence-related effects and lead to new findings that depend on the availability of large quantity of data. This Confidence Database will continue to enable new discoveries and can serve as a blueprint for similar databases in related fields.

It is still debated whether metacognition, or the ability to monitor our own mental states, relies on mechanisms that are ‘domain-general’ (a single mechanism can account for the monitoring of any mental process) or ‘domain-specific’ (metacognition is accomplished by a collection of multiple monitoring modules, one for each cognitive domain). It has been speculated that two broad categories of metacognitive mechanisms may exist: those that monitor primarily externally-generated vs. those that monitor primarily internally-generated information.To test this proposed division, we measured metacognitive performance (using m-ratio, a signal detection theoretical measure) in four tasks that could be ranked along an internal-external axis of the source of information, namely memory, motor, visuomotor and visual tasks. We found correlations between m-ratios in visuomotor and motor tasks only; but no correlations between m-ratios in visual and visuomotor tasks, or between motor and memory tasks.While we found no correlation in metacognitive ability between visual and memory tasks, and a positive correlation between visuomotor and motor tasks, we found no evidence for a correlation between motor and memory tasks. This pattern of correlations does not support the grouping of domains based on whether the source of information is primarily internal or external. We suggest that other groupings could be more reflective of the nature of metacognition and discuss the need to consider other non-domain task-features when using correlations as a way to test the underlying shared mechanisms between domains.

It is still debated whether metacognition, or the ability to monitor our own mental states, relies on processes that are “domain-general” (a single set of processes can account for the monitoring of any mental process) or “domain-specific” (metacognition is accomplished by a collection of multiple monitoring modules, one for each cognitive domain). It has been speculated that two broad categories of metacognitive processes may exist: those that monitor primarily externally generated versus those that monitor primarily internally generated information. To test this proposed division, we measured metacognitive performance (using m-ratio, a signal detection theoretical measure) in four tasks that could be ranked along an internal-external axis of the source of information, namely memory, motor, visuomotor, and visual tasks. We found correlations between m-ratios in visuomotor and motor tasks, but no correlations between m-ratios in visual and visuomotor tasks, or between motor and memory tasks. While we found no correlation in metacognitive ability between visual and memory tasks, and a positive correlation between visuomotor and motor tasks, we found no evidence for a correlation between motor and memory tasks. This pattern of correlations does not support the grouping of domains based on whether the source of information is primarily internal or external. We suggest that other groupings could be more reflective of the nature of metacognition and discuss the need to consider other non-domain task-features when using correlations as a way to test the underlying shared processes between domains.

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