The diminishing criterion model for metacognitive regulation of time investment.

Abstract

According to the Discrepancy Reduction Model for metacognitive regulation, people invest time in cognitive tasks in a goal-driven manner until their metacognitive judgment, either judgment of learning (JOL) or confidence, meets their preset goal. This stopping rule should lead to judgments above the goal, regardless of invested time. However, in many tasks, time is negatively correlated with JOL and confidence, with low judgments after effortful processing. This pattern has often been explained as stemming from bottom-up fluency effects on the judgments. While accepting this explanation for simple tasks, like memorizing pairs of familiar words, the proposed Diminishing Criterion Model (DCM) challenges this explanation for complex tasks, like problem solving. Under the DCM, people indeed invest effort in a goal-driven manner. However, investing more time leads to increasing compromise on the goal, resulting in negative time-judgment correlations. Experiment 1 exposed that with word-pair memorization, negative correlations are found only with minimal fluency and difficulty variability, whereas in problem solving, they are found consistently. As predicted, manipulations of low incentives (Experiment 2) and time pressure (Experiment 3) in problem solving revealed greater compromise as more time was invested in a problem. Although intermediate confidence ratings rose during the solving process, the result was negative time-confidence correlations (Experiments 3, 4, and 5), and this was not eliminated by the opportunity to respond "don't know" (Experiments 4 and 5). The results suggest that negative time-judgment correlations in complex tasks stem from top-down regulatory processes with a criterion that diminishes with invested time.

Judgments of learning depend on how learners interpret study effort.

“…A similar pattern was observed for confidence in problem solving tasks: Participants spent more time solving high-incentive than low-incentive problems and expressed higher confidence in the solution of the high-incentive problems (Ackerman, 2013;Koriat et al, 2006). However, within each incentive level, confi dence correlated negatively with solution time.…”

The intersection between Descriptivism and Meliorism in reasoning research: further proposals in support of ‘soft normativism’

“…Importantly, such heuristic cues to accuracy may not be valid predictors of normative correctness, leading to some striking dissociations between participants’ response confidence and normative standards of accuracy (e.g., see Shynkaruk and Thompson, 2006; Prowse Turner and Thompson, 2009; De Neys et al, 2013). Thompson (2009) and Thompson et al (2011b, 2013) have gone beyond the basic concept of answer fluency in their theorizing to suggest that such fluency mediates a judgment that they term ‘Feeling of Rightness.’ It is this Feeling of Rightness judgment that then acts as a metacognitive trigger, either: (1) terminating processing in cases where a Type 1 process has readily produced a rapid, intuitive answer that is attributed to be correct; or (2) switching from Type 1 to Type 2 processing in cases where the initial, intuitive answer is associated with a low Feeling of Rightness and is therefore attributed to be potentially incorrect (see Ackerman, 2014, for further evidence and model development regarding people’s time investment in reasoning).…”

“…In sum, recent evidence gives clear grounds for viewing meta-reasoning judgments as playing a crucial role in monitoring and regulating on-going reasoning, such that intermediate confidence or ‘rightness’ assessments determine the amount of subsequent effort that reasoners invest in a task (Ackerman, 2014). The methodology underpinning this meta-reasoning research is based on a rich triangulation of measures, including various forms of confidence judgments as well as processing times and normative response accuracy.…”

Motivational Reasons for Biased Decisions: The Sunk-Cost Effect’s Instrumental Rationality

“…However, the level is not permanently set. According to the duration of the task, the level can sink, thereby leading to judgments with lower requirements for certainty (Diminishing Criterion Model, Ackerman, 2014). During the task, a “feeling of rightness” is experienced if a first solution feels right (Thompson et al, 2011; Ackerman and Thompson, 2017).…”