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Nonhuman animals can engage in forms of metacognitive control and monitoring processes. However, very little testing of the relation between fluency and metacognition has been done in animals, and little research has assessed memory performance in relation to animals making immediate versus delayed judgments of their memory. Here, wagers made by monkeys during test trials served as a form of confidence measure of how well they could complete a memory test. These wagers occurred either after the delay interval between the sample presentation and the test (delayed judgments) or after the sample presentation but before the delay interval and the test (immediate judgments). Overall, no significant difference in performance was found between these two conditions. We also manipulated the fluency of stimuli by either contrasting small (low fluency) or large (high fluency) stimuli or by manipulating size and the degree to which stimuli were of similar perceptual classes (low fluency, harder to distinguish stimuli such as triangular shapes) or were dissimilar in color and shape (high fluency, clip art images). Although low fluency stimuli were remembered at lower levels, the monkeys showed no evidence of adjusting wagering behavior as a function of stimulus type. Thus, the present experiment showed no evidence that monkeys benefitted from delay of judgments of memory and no evidence of stimulus fluency affecting their confidence as measured by their wagering. Rather, most monkeys preferred consistent wagers across all trial types. This may indicate a metacognitive limitation or some other form of behavioral satisficing that led to suboptimal performance.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2026
Asymmetrical monitoring of subjective asynchronies: a metacognitive generalized STEARC effect
Abstract Previous studies have demonstrated that human participants can keep track of the magnitude and direction of their trial-to-trial errors in temporal, spatial, and numerical estimates, collectively referred to as “metric error monitoring.” These studies investigated metric error monitoring in an explicit timing/counting context. However, many of our judgments may also depend on temporal mismatches between stimuli where the temporal information is not processed explicitly, which eventually brings about the simultaneity perception. We investigated whether participants can monitor errors in their simultaneity perception. We tested participants in temporal orer judgment (TOJ) task, where they judged which of the two consecutive stimuli (one on each side of the screen) appeared first and reported their confidence rating for each TOJ. The results of all four experiments showed that the confidence judgements for correct judgments increased and for incorrect judgments decreased with longer absolute SOA. A more granular analysis showed that participants could only monitor their errors for left-first and bottom-first judgments, which suggests a metacognitive spatial–temporal association of response codes (STEARC) effect.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1922598
- PAR ID:
- 10657233
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychological Research
- Volume:
- 89
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0340-0727
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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