Multidomain Metacognitive Task Assessment – A Pilot Study

Whether metacognition reflects a general capacity or a set of domain specific abilities remains unclear. Findings across perceptual, memory, and higher cognitive tasks often diverge, with some studies reporting positive cross domain correlations and others observing weak or absent associations. This inconsistency has made it difficult to determine whether metacognitive processes share a common structure or are shaped primarily by the requirements of each cognitive domain.A recent study by Mazancieux et al. (2020) directly addressed this question using a four task battery spanning memory, perception, executive function, and semantic knowledge. They reported modest but significant correlations in metacognitive efficiency across domains, which they interpreted as evidence for a general metacognitive factor. However, a reanalysis of their data revealed substantial ceiling effects, inflated accuracy due to binary response formats, and missing confidence ratings, all of which limit the strength of this conclusion.The present pilot study therefore sought to revise and evaluate the original task set in order to obtain more sensitive and feasible measures of metacognitive performance. Three tasks were iteratively redesigned to improve difficulty scaling, confidence measurement, and discriminability. The semantic memory task was replaced with a newly developed mindfulness-based attention task that operationalises present centred awareness through sustained fixation and self-monitored attentional lapses. Across small, supervised samples, the revised tasks produced interpretable accuracy distributions and reliable confidence data. These results provide a refined and viable task battery for a future large-scale study aimed at testing the structure of metacognition across domains.