Domain generality in metacognitive ability: A confirmatory study across visual perception, episodic memory, and semantic memory.

Abstract

Metacognition is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes, with higher order mechanisms assessing the performance of lower level cognitive operations to determine subjective confidence. An open question is whether metacognitive capacity is domain-general, akin to a conductor overseeing various sections of an orchestra, or whether it is inherently coupled with each domain, resembling a collection of specialized musical directors for each instrument group. Previous studies attempting to address this question have suffered from methodological drawbacks, such as a lack of control over cognitive performance and low statistical power. In this confirmatory, preregistered study, we addressed this gap by testing metacognitive ability in visual perceptual, episodic memory, and semantic memory domains using a newly developed adaptive "trivia" task spanning judgments about nutrition and global economics. We found substantive correlations in metacognitive bias and efficiency across domains, even when controlling for cognitive ability, suggesting up to 15%-20% shared variance in metacognition across different modalities. Surprisingly, however, we found the lowest correlation in metacognition between the two semantic memory domains, despite these tasks being matched on performance and surface-level features. Our results broadly support the existence of a metacognitive "g-factor," excluding several important methodological confounds, while also highlighting the importance of further research into interindividual differences in metacognitive priors which may explain the lower correlations between the different semantic memory domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).