Adaptive curiosity about metacognitive ability.

Abstract

Metacognition provides control and oversight to the process of acquiring and using knowledge. Efficient metacognition is essential to many aspects of daily life, from health care 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 perceptual from metacognitive information searches. Observers displayed a strategic balance in their curiosity, alternating between a focus on perceptual accuracy and metacognitive performance. Depending on the context, this metacognitive curiosity was modulated by an internal evaluation of metacognition, leading to increased feedback requests when metacognition was likely to be inaccurate. Using an ideal observer model, we describe how this curiosity trade-off can arise naturally from a recursive evaluation and transformation of decisions' evidence. These results show that individuals are inherently curious about their metacognitive abilities and can compare perceptual and metacognitive precision to fine-tune performance monitoring. We propose that this form of curiosity may reflect humans' drive to refine their self-model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).