Confidence in decision making across domains and modalities: evidence from three studies

Metacognition involves second-order judgments about first-order ones. It remains unclear whether an individual's confidence in being correct is generated by the same system across tasks (domain-generality) or whether it is computed independently in the context of each task (domain-specificity). Previous studies have focused on correlations across several tasks, yet evidence is mixed and more complex models of domain-generality were not taken into account. Analyzing three studies (N between 253 and 547 participants), we found a fixed pattern of cross-task correlations for both metacognitive bias and metacognitive efficiency. We used confirmatory factor analyses to investigate the existence of general processes. We found evidence for a weak domain-generality with a metacognitive module for perceptual tasks and another for cognitive tasks. From our structural equation modeling analyses with metacognitive bias, we concluded that previous work found spurious correlations in metacognitive efficiency between these perceptual and cognitive modules likely due to metacognitive bias.