Measuring metacognition of direct and indirect parameters of voluntary movement.

Abstract

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.

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

“…We suggest that confidence judgments about agency should be considered as the metacognitive level of an agency processing hierarchy, with agency judgments as explicit first-order judgments. This also brings agency in line with recent motor metacognition research that considers agency-like judgments such as decisions of which trajectory was caused by one's movement to be the first-order motor judgments, followed by metacognitive confidence ratings (Arbuzova et al, 2021).…”

Metacognitive domains are not aligned along a dimension of internal-external information source

“…The visual and memory tasks were adapted from Morales et al (2018). The visuomotor and motor tasks were based on the metacognitive version of the Skittles task (Müller & Sternad, 2004) and adapted from our previous work ("angles task" in Arbuzova et al, 2021). The order of the tasks (visual, memory and the two versions of the Skittles tasks) was counterbalanced between participants.…”

“…We pre-registered, and followed, the same exclusion criteria as in Arbuzova et al (2021). We excluded trials with response times shorter than 0.2 s and longer than 8 s (<1%).…”

“…EXTERNAL METACOGNITIVE DOMAINS 6 external (visual and proprioceptive) and internal (motor command) sources of information. The first three hypotheses were pre-registered, and the final two are based on our previous study (Arbuzova et al, 2021) and follow the same logic as the others.…”

Can Stephen Curry really know?—Conscious access to outcome prediction of motor actions

“…Arbuzova and colleagues [ 23 ] examined metacognitive abilities in the discrimination of two different outcomes based on predictions in a similar version of the virtual goal-oriented throwing task used here. After each trial, participants had to decide which of two alternative task outcomes had been produced by their own movement.…”