Augmented Metacognition

Abstract

Metacognitive awareness enables people to make conscious decisions about their own cognitions, and adapt to meet task performance goals. Despite the role of metacognition in task performance, technologies that effectively augment metacognition are scarce. We explore a novel approach to augment metacognition based on making the eye's pupil dilations, which associate with a variety of cognitions, audible via sonification in real-time. In this exploratory study, we investigated whether pupil dilation sonification can elicit metacognitive awareness. Our findings suggest that correlations between a variety of cognitions, e.g., attentional focus and depth of thinking, and sounds generated by the sonification can emerge spontaneously and by instruction. This justifies further research into the use of pupil dilation sonification as a means to augment metacognitive abilities.

Co-Design with Myself: A Brain-Computer Interface Design Tool that Predicts Live Emotion to Enhance Metacognitive Monitoring of Designers

“…In contrast to existing creativity support tools that primarily enhance human perception and cognition [77], our work explores a fresh possibility: to enhance metacognition in the creative process, an area not deeply addressed in current research. Previous studies have predominantly focused on the various forms and modalities of biofeedback, with a central aim of improving mindfulness [19,34,76,104]. Going beyond these approaches, we investigated a new potential application of neurofeedback systems: the integration of emotions into the design process.…”

“…Similarly, another study helped users to perceive their pupil dilation that are associated with different cognitive tasks by making pupil dilation audible. Their findings suggested most users were able to associate cognitive activities with the sounds, which elicited metacognitive awareness [19]. Besides haptic and audial feedback, a third study translated heart rate into shape-changing displays, which brought awareness of users' physiological states through visual feedback [104].…”