Adaptive curiosity about metacognitive ability

Metacognition provides control and oversight to the process of acquiring and using knowledge. Efficient metacognition is essential to many aspects of daily life, from healthcare to finance and education. Across three experiments, we found a specific form of curiosity in humans about the quality of their own metacognition, using a novel approach that dissociates cognitive from metacognitive information searches. Observers displayed a strategic balance in their curiosity, alternating between a focus on cognitive accuracy and metacognitive performance. This adaptive curiosity was modulated by an internal evaluation of metacognition, leading to increased feedback requests when metacognition was likely to be inaccurate. These results show that individuals are inherently curious about their metacognitive abilities and can compare cognitive and metacognitive precision to fine-tune performance monitoring. We propose that this newly observed curiosity may reflect humans’ focus on meta-learning, or 'learning to learn', a promising avenue in the study of minds and machines.