The effect of metacognitive training on confidence and strategic reminder setting

Abstract

Individuals often choose between remembering information using their own memory ability versus using external resources to reduce cognitive demand (i.e. ‘cognitive offloading’). For example, to remember a future appointment an individual could choose to set a smartphone reminder or depend on their unaided memory ability. Previous studies investigating strategic reminder setting found that participants set more reminders than would be optimal, and this bias towards reminder-setting was predicted by metacognitive underconfidence in unaided memory ability. Due to the link between underconfidence in memory ability and excessive reminder setting, the aim of the current study was to investigate whether metacognitive training is an effective intervention to a) improve metacognitive judgment accuracy, and b) reduce bias in strategic offloading behaviour. Participants either received metacognitive training which involved making performance predictions and receiving feedback on judgment accuracy, or were part of a control group. As predicted, metacognitive training increased judgment accuracy: participants in the control group were significantly underconfident in their memory ability, whereas the experimental group showed no significant metacognitive bias. However, contrary to predictions, both experimental and control groups were significantly biased toward reminder-setting, and did not differ significantly. Therefore, reducing metacognitive bias was not sufficient to eliminate the bias towards reminders. We suggest that the reminder bias likely results in part from erroneous metacognitive evaluations, but that other factors such as a preference to avoid cognitive effort may also be relevant. Finding interventions to mitigate these factors could improve the adaptive use of external resources.

Individual differences in cognitive offloading: a comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity

“…Metacognitions, however, may be of different relevance for different types of offloading tasks. On the one hand, metacognitive confidence in one's own memory performance is inversely correlated with offloading behavior in the intention offloading task (Boldt & Gilbert, 2019;Gilbert, 2015b; but see Engeler & Gilbert, 2020). On the other hand, however, this relationship is more complicated in the pattern copy task.…”

“…Recently, this view has received empirical support from research demonstrating shared variance between individual differences in metacognitive beliefs and offloading behavior (e.g., Boldt & Gilbert, 2019;Gilbert, 2015b;Hu et al, 2019;Risko & Dunn, 2015;. It seems noteworthy, however, that the relationship between metacognitive considerations about one's own memory reliability and cognitive offloading so far mostly has been demonstrated on the correlational level only and that direct manipulations of metacognitive evaluations did not always induce the corresponding effects on offloading behavior (Engeler & Gilbert, 2020;Grinschgl et al, 2020b; but see also Gilbert et al, 2020). Nevertheless, the correlational evidence indicates that individual differences might provide important contributions to the explanation of cognitive offloading.…”

Value-based routing of delayed intentions into brain-based vs external memory stores

“…Experiment 1 showed that participants were much more likely to offload high-than low-value intentions. Therefore, value can be added to the factors that affect intention offloading, alongside additional factors established in previous work such as memory load and task interruption (Gilbert, 2015a), confidence (Gilbert, 2015b;Gilbert et al, 2020), task instructions (Boldt & Gilbert, 2019), effort-avoidance , previous reminder setting (Scarampi & Gilbert, 2020), age (Scarampi & Gilbert, 2021), and metacognitive interventions (Gilbert et al, 2020; but see also Engeler & Gilbert, 2020;Grinschgl et al, 2020).…”

Individual differences in cognitive offloading: A comparison of intention offloading, pattern copy, and short-term memory capacity

“…Recently, this view has received empirical support from research demonstrating shared variance between individual differences in metacognitive beliefs and offloading behavior (e.g., Boldt & Gilbert, 2019;Gilbert, 2015b;Hu et al, 2019;Risko & Dunn, 2015;. It seems noteworthy, however, that the relationship between metacognitive considerations about one's own memory reliability and cognitive offloading so far mostly has been demonstrated on the correlational level only and that direct manipulations of metacognitive evaluations did not always induce the corresponding effects on offloading behavior (Engeler & Gilbert, 2020;Grinschgl, Meyerhoff, Schwan, & Papenmeier, 2020; but see also Gilbert et al, 2020).…”