Emergence of Metacognitive Knowledge via Audible Pupil Size

Abstract

Metacognitive knowledge is critical for adaptive behavior and depends on the ability to sense one's physiological signals. Some physiological signals, however, cannot be sensed yet carry critical information about one's thinking processes. The eye's pupils are an interesting example of this. Pupil size is typically inaccessible to the senses, yet it correlates with changes in attention and cognitive load. Using technology to map pupil size to audible sound in real-time, could therefore facilitate learning metacognitive knowledge. This was confirmed in a mixed between-within subject experiment, where participants (n=57) reported to be more able to use the sound to acquire metacognitive knowledge when using a real rather than a sham mapping from pupil size to sound during three thinking tasks. Specifically, participants using real audible pupil size were less likely to slightly disagree or be uncertain about their ability to use the sound to acquire metacognitive knowledge, but this difference was not found when participants reported high agreement. The contribution of this research is therefore that making pupil size audible can facilitate the emergence of new metacognitive knowledge.