Toward a Metacognitive Account of Cognitive Offloading

Abstract

Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by independently manipulating the costs associated with both word rotation and array frame rotation. Surprisingly, we found that individuals' patterns of spontaneous physical rotations did not follow patterns of performance costs or benefits associated with being physically rotated, findings difficult to reconcile with existing theories of strategy selection involving external resources. Individuals' subjective ratings of perceived benefits, rather, provided an excellent match to the patterns of physical rotations, suggesting that the critical variable when deciding on-the-fly whether to incorporate an external resource is the participant's metacognitive beliefs regarding expected performance or the effort required for each approach (i.e., internal vs. internal + external). Implications for metacognition's future in theories of cognitive offloading are discussed.

Problem Solvers Adjust Cognitive Offloading Based on Performance Goals

“…First, participants might have focused on the goal-related feedback, that is, used the feedback as an error signal to improve subsequent behavior (i.e., performance monitoring; for a review, see Ullsperger, Fischer, Nigbur, & Endrass, 2014). Such metacognitive judgments are likely employed (Dunn & Risko, 2016; but not without fault Risko & Dunn, 2015). Similarly, participants might have monitored their errors and timing independently from the displayed feedback.…”

Evaluating Effort: Influences of Evaluation Mode on Judgments of Task‐specific Efforts

“…Examination of these situations has implications for the study of cognitive offloading where a decision to forego some form of internal processing (i.e., cognitive effort) is made in favor for external processing (e.g., physical effort; Dunn & Risko, ; Gilbert, ; Kirsh & Maglio, ; Martin & Schwartz, ; Risko & Dunn, ; Risko & Gilbert, ; Risko et al, ; Wilson, ). For example, external normalization (Dunn & Risko, ; Risko et al, ) represents an instance where individuals physically rotate their body to bring some disoriented display to its canonical orientation, instead of performing the analogous internal transformation. Here, individuals trade off cognitive effort in the form of some type of internal transformation for physical effort in the form of moving one's body.…”

“…That is, individuals should choose the one‐word display rotated 90° as the more effortful alternative. Such a prediction for JE choice is counterintuitive given the clear difference in objective effort (e.g., as indexed by performance) between processing one‐word relative to two words (e.g., Dunn & Risko, ).…”

“…However, this does not appear to be the case with regard to cognitive effort. Cognitive effort is a far more challenging construct to define and study empirically (Botvinick & Braver, ; Dunn & Risko, ; Kurzban, ; Westbrook & Braver, ). Although many accounts have attempted to generalize the energetic aspect of physical effort accounts to cognitive effort accounts (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, ; Boksem & Tops, ; Gailliot & Baumeister, ), this premise has been met with a large amount of skepticism on the basis of theoretical and empirical grounds (e.g., Botvinick & Braver, ; Carter & McCullough, ; Gibson, ; Hockey, ; Inzlicht & Schmeichel, , ; Job, Walton, Bernecker, & Dweck, ; Kelly, Sünram‐Lea, & Crawford, ; Lange & Eggert, ; Lurquin et al, ; Kurzban, ; Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, & Myers, ; Raichle & Mintun, ; Vadillo, Gold, & Osman, ; Westbrook & Braver, ).…”

“…Payne, Bettman, and Johnson () make a critical distinction between the two arguing that it is the evaluations and judgments of anticipated (or perceived) effort that play the primary role in strategy selection and decision making, for example, avoiding engaging in a task outright, although experienced effort can indeed theoretically become anticipated effort given some hypothesized monitoring mechanism (e.g., Anzai & Simon, ; Koriat & Levy‐Sadot, ; Payne et al, ; Son & Metcalfe, ; Vernon & Usher, ). Several recent proposals have argued that perceived effort is subjective in nature (Dunn & Risko, ; Dunn et al, ; Kool et al, ; Westbrook & Braver, ) serving as a type of “summary signal” used to select lines of action (Dunn et al, ). It is important to note, though, that while effort is often closely coupled with other potential determinants of behavior (e.g., task difficulty) and often covaries with similar signals (e.g., fatigue or arousal), effort can be understood as a unique cost considered in the decision‐making process (for reviews on these issues, see Kurzban et al, , and Westbrook & Braver, ).…”