Metacognition in psychophysical judgment: An unfolding view of comparative judgments of mental workload

Abstract

An experiment is reported in which it was found that when subjects were required to indicate which of two visual extents was more difficult to categorize as "long" or "short," they executed these categorizations and then measured the distance of the representation ofeach stimulus from the long-short category boundary; the stimulus nearer the boundary was judged to be the more difficult. When they were requested to indicate which was easier to categorize, they selected the alternative that was farther. Coombs's theory of data (1952, 1964) and his unfolding theory of preferential choice (1950, 1964) provided the conceptualization of metacognition in this psychophysical task context. Strong support for the probabilisitic version of unfolding theory was obtained from the observed selective effects of laterality on the levels of stochastic transitivity attained for various classes of triples and the reliably longer times for comparisons with bilateral pairs than with unilateral pairs. The semantic congruity effects obtained, together with the changes in the form of the relationship between probability and response time as a function of practice, can be best accounted for by an evidence accrual theory in which the distances from the active reference point are measured and compared with a criterion on each evidence accrual. No support is provided for the view that propositionally based semantic "ease"-"difficulty" codes serve as the basis for these metacognitive comparative judgments of ease and difficulty.Although theories of the process of comparing perceptual (see Link & Heath, 1975;Luce, 1986;Smith & Vickers, 1988;Townsend & Ashby, 1983), symbolic (see Banks, 1977; Birnbaum & Jou, 1990;Moyer & Dumais, 1978;Petrusic & Baranski, 1991), numerical (see Dehaene, 1989;Link, 1990), and affective (e.g., Busemeyer, Forsyth, & Nozawa, 1988;Petrusic & Jamieson, 1978) magnitudes are now weU developed, the study of the more phenomenal aspects of judgmental choice behavior lags far behind. Recently, Petrusic and Jamieson (1989) initiated both theoretical and experimental investigations of the judgment of the ease of comparative judgments. In their experiments, on some trials, subjects were required to judge whether the stimuli in a pair of brightness patches were the same or different, and on other trials, subjects directly compared two pairs of brightness patches, selectThis research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grant to W. M. Petrusic. The data reported here were collected as part of an honors thesis submitted by Paula Cloutier to the Psychology Department at Carleton University. Completion of the article was made possible through the marvelous hospitality of the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Australia during Petrusic's study leave. Christine Gatti, Geoffrey Hammond, John Hogben, Chris Pratt, and Tony Gibbs provided hardware, software, and general support throughout. We also thank Joseph Baranski, Ja-Anne leFevre, Neil MacMillan, and an anonymous reviewer for nu...

Choice Certainty Is Informed by Both Evidence and Decision Time

“…2B). Compared to correct responses, RTs were longer for error responses (t-test, p<10 −6 , 13%–65% increase across subjects), and the error certainties were smaller accordingly (p<0.002)(Petrusic and Cloutier, 1992; Pierrel and Murray, 1963; Vickers and Smith, 1985). Importantly, among the error responses themselves, subjects were more confident about faster errors (Eq.…”

“…Like SDT, most bounded accumulation models attribute certainty to the state of the evidence at the time of decision (Beck et al, 2008; Petrusic and Cloutier, 1992; Van Zandt and Maldonado-Molina, 2004; Vickers, 1979; cf. Audley, 1960; Juslin and Olsson, 1997).…”

Remembered instructions with symbolic and perceptual comparisons

“…Enhanced SCEs follow, as in the single-sample case, from the assumption that the increased demands on memory for the instruction slow the code-matching and code translation processes. This postdecisional response translation notion, however, is clear in predicting smaller SCE effects in RTs for error responses than for correct responses, as derived by Petrusic and Cloutier (1992), contrary to the clearly larger observed SCEs on error trials than on correct trials (Petrusic, 1992;Petrusic & Baranski, 1989a, 1989b.…”

Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: The case of Change Blindness Blindness

“…Feelings of fluency are also known to play a role in metaperception, in tasks such as detection, discrimination or recognition (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Petrusic & Baranski, 1989;Petrusic & Cloutier, 1992;Wurtz, Reber, & Zimmermann, 2008), whether in prospective, or in retrospective self-evaluations. No research has been conducted, however, about how the amount of effort engaged in a given change detection trial influences CBB for that trial.…”