engleski

Accuracy of metacognitive judgments in syllogistic reasoning

Metacognitive processes of monitoring and control have been extensively studied in the domains of memory and text comprehension, but recently it has been recognized that it is important to expand the study of metacognition to other domains of cognition. In this study we investigated the absolute and relative accuracy of metacognitive judgments in syllogistic reasoning, using a broad set of syllogistic problems. In three experiments, three types of metacognitive judgments were explored: confidence judgments, judgments of performance and judgments of task difficulty. In Experiment 1, participants made confidence judgments after they had reached a conclusion that followed logically from given premises. In Experiment 2, after solving the problems using multiple choice tasks, participants made both confidence judgments and judgments of difficulty. In Experiment 3, judgments of performance and judgments of difficulty were made after a quick overview of each problem. In each experiment participants solved 24 syllogistic problems. In Experiment 1, the mean confidence for correct responses was higher than for incorrect responses, t(39) = 5.86, p < .01. In Experiments 2 and 3, there were no significant differences in metacognitive judgments between correct and incorrect responses. The low absolute accuracy of the participants' metacognitive judgments in all three experiments indicated the overconfidence of the participants. The relative accuracy of judgments was also generally low, with the exception of Experiment 1 where the participants showed some ability to differentiate between tasks which were solved correctly and those that were not solved correctly: the average intraindividual gamma correlation (an index of relative judgment accuracy) between confidence and performance was .31, and it was significantly different from zero (t(39) = 5.66, p < .01). Finally, interindividual correlations between performance and relative accuracy were analyzed. For judgments made after solving the syllogistic problems, correlation coefficients between judgment accuracy and performance were positive: r = .52, p<.01 for confidence judgments in Experiment 1 ; r = .29, p = .05 for confidence judgments and r = .40, p < .05 for judgments of difficulty in Experiment 2. For both judgments of performance and judgments of difficulty made before solving the syllogistic problems in Experiment 3 correlations between relative accuracy and performance were not significant.

metacognition ; syllogistic reasoning ; judgment accuracy

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