Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 57, January 2018, Pages 33-40
Consciousness and Cognition

Altering movement parameters disrupts metacognitive accuracy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.11.005Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Movement speed impacts metacognitive judgements.

  • Moving faster raises confidence in incorrect decisions.

  • Data suggests kinematic information should be included in models of metacognition.

Abstract

Correctly estimating the confidence we should have in our decisions has traditionally been viewed as a perceptual judgement based solely on the strength or quality of sensory information. However, accumulating evidence has demonstrated that the motor system contributes to judgements of perceptual confidence. Here, we manipulated the speed at which participants’ moved using a behavioural priming task and showed that increasing movement speed above participants’ baseline measures disrupts their ability to form accurate confidence judgements about their performance. Specifically, after being primed to move faster than they would naturally, participants reported higher confidence in their incorrect decisions than when they moved at their natural pace. We refer to this finding as the adamantly wrong effect. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that veridical feedback from the effector used to indicate a decision is employed to form accurate metacognitive judgements of performance.

Keywords

Metacognition
Confidence

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