Metacognition 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 data from 10 tasks collected across three studies (N between 253 and 547 participants), we found a fixed pattern of cross-task correlations for both metacognitive bias and metacognitive efficiency. In accordance with previous studies, we found that hierarchical estimation of metacognitive efficiency led to higher correlations. 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.