Strategic use of reminders: Influence of both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive confidence, independent of objective memory ability

Abstract

How do we decide whether to use external artifacts and reminders to remember delayed intentions, versus relying on unaided memory? Experiment 1 (N=400) showed that participants' choice to forgo reminders in an experimental task was independently predicted by subjective confidence and objective ability, even when the two measures were themselves uncorrelated. Use of reminders improved performance, explaining significant variance in intention fulfilment even after controlling for unaided ability. Experiment 2 (N=303) additionally investigated a pair of unrelated perceptual discrimination tasks, where the confidence and sensitivity of metacognitive judgments was decorrelated from objective performance using a staircase procedure. Participants with lower confidence in their perceptual judgments set more reminders in the delayed-intention task, even though confidence was unrelated to objective accuracy. However, memory confidence was a better predictor of reminder setting. Thus, propensity to set reminders was independently influenced by (a) domain-general metacognitive confidence; (b) task-specific confidence; and (c) objective ability.

Storing information in-the-world: Metacognition and cognitive offloading in a short-term memory task

“…Evidence for metacognition's role in offloading has been demonstrated recently. For example, Gilbert (2015a) demonstrated that individual's spontaneous use of reminders in a prospective memory task was predicted by their ''memory confidence'' or how well they predicted they would perform in that task independent of their actual performance. In a similar vein, Dunn and Risko (in press) reported a dissociation between performance and offloading in a perceptual task (i.e., performance was equivalent across two conditions that differed substantially in rates of spontaneous offloading) that was explained by a kind of metacognitive error wherein participants were clearly ''misperceiving'' the relative costs/benefits of the different internal versus external strategies.…”

“…Nonetheless, Gilbert (2015a) recently demonstrated a similar relation between cognitive offloading and objective unaided ability in the context of a prospective memory task. Specifically individuals who performed more poorly on the task without the ability to offload intentions (i.e., set reminders) more frequently offloaded when free to do so in a matched task (Gilbert, 2015a). With respect to how individuals use external forms of storage, the vast majority, when they decided to write, copied all of the letters presented rather than trying to store some information externally and some internally.…”

Self-evaluation of decision-making: A general Bayesian framework for metacognitive computation.

“…In the absence of external feedback, such estimates may be furnished by second-order computation, which outputs a subjective probability of success. This probability provides a useful indicator of whether a previous decision should be corrected (Resulaj et al, 2009), whether a subsequent step in a chain of decisions should be initiated (Dehaene & Sigman, 2012), whether to make the task easier by offloading intentions into the environment (Gilbert, 2015), or more generally when it is advantageous to deliberate (Keramati et al, 2011) or engage cognitive control (Boureau et al, 2015; Shenhav, Botvinick, & Cohen, 2013). Here we focus on the generation of confidence in a single task, but one could envisage replicating this architecture to maintain internal estimates of long-run confidence over a number of tasks (Donoso, Collins, & Koechlin, 2014).…”

ForgetMeNot

“…The mismatch between perceived and actual memory ability has been reported by previous researchers in the context of reminder setting amongst the general population. Gilbert and colleagues found that both subjective confidence in memory ability and actual memory ability influenced reminder setting behaviour, even though the two were uncorrelated [12].…”