Individual Differences in Metacognitive Responsiveness: Cognitive and Personality Correlates

Abstract

Individuals differ not only in the ability to make decisions, but also in the degree to which they respond adaptively to uncertainty about those decisions. We examined how optimally 124 participants used an uncertain response on near-threshold trials of a psychophysical task. All participants showed overconfidence, but women tended to be more adaptive than men in responsiveness to uncertainty. Participants who responded to uncertainty most optimally exhibited more cognitive failures, fewer attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder symptoms, greater need for closure, better attention scanning skills, but larger effects of Stroop-task incongruity compared with participants who were least optimal in responsiveness to uncertainty. These data suggest that response competition might provide a mechanism for the cognitive experience of uncertainty. Keywords attention; gender differences; monitoring; personality; uncertainty A PHYSICIAN EXAMINES an array of medical records. She is your physician. They are your records. Test results, symptom descriptions, X-rays, and other data provide conflicting and ambiguous clues about your physical health. Medical references and journal articles supply information on a host of candidate diseases and treatment options. Perhaps everything is fine and your illness is minor-but perhaps not.At times like these, you want your physician to be the best diagnostician available. You need someone who is highly skilled at discriminating between tumor and shadow, between test results that suggest a serious disorder and those that indicate a transient condition, between a health issue that requires immediate treatment and one that lacks urgency. But what other cognitive attributes might you value in your physician at times like this? Is your physician one who, when in doubt, will rely on intuition and make a best guess? Will she order more tests, consult a colleague for a second opinion, and research the symptoms further? Will your physician recognize when she doesn't really know what to diagnose? How will she respond to

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