The many facets of metacognition: comparing multiple measures of metacognition in healthy individuals

Metacognition is important for successful goal-directed behavior. It consists of two main elements: metacognitive knowledge and online awareness. Online awareness consists of monitoring and self-regulation. Metacognitive sensitivity is the extent to which someone can accurately distinguish their own correct from incorrect responses and is an important aspect of monitoring of behavior. Research into the interplay between these elements is currently lacking. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to explore how these different elements of metacognition can predict metacognitive sensitivity. Healthy participants filled out the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory with two subscales that serve as measures of metacognitive knowledge. Next, as measures of online awareness, they performed a memory task that was adapted to include trial-by-trial confidence judgments, and made pro- and retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on this task. The 128 included participants show a large variability in scores on all the different metacognitive measures. Metacognitive sensitivity was predicted by higher prospective discrepancy scores and lower retrospective discrepancy scores but not by metacognitive knowledge. The current study confirms that metacognition is a multidimensional concept consisting of different elements. Online measures seem to be associated with each other, but not so much with offline measures. The current framework can be used to further investigate the associations between different elements of metacognition within persons.