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Abstract

Despite being the focus of countless investigations in recent decades, metacognition as a construct remains poorly understood. This is especially true for one subset of metacognition—global metacognition—which comprises generalized assessments of one’s cognitive abilities. One major hindrance to the advancement of theoretical frameworks on global metacognition is the absence of appropriate measurement techniques. Using a novel cognitive battery and global metacognition questionnaire (Metacognitive Insight Questionnaire or MIQ; Wong & Gallo, 2019), recent work from our lab (Arar et al., in prep) has attempted to address this methodological limitation by introducing an objective way to measure global metacognition. In addition to providing this new technique, this work also sought to examine how task experience may impact people’s global metacognitive beliefs. However, this work did not consider the potential conflation of item types on the MIQ, specifically items that are more pertinent to our cognitive battery, or congruent, with items that are incongruent. The present work addresses this limitation; here, we sought to investigate whether task-incongruent and congruent beliefs are differentially affected by task exposure in younger and older adults. Results revealed that younger adults exhibited task-induced belief updating only for task-congruent beliefs, demonstrating that younger adults may be able to adaptively utilize relevant cues to inform and update their global metacognitive beliefs. Older adults, however, did not exhibit this discrimination effect; they adjusted both belief types downward (i.e., expressed less confidence in their cognitive abilities) after completing our cognitive battery, perhaps illustrating stereotype threat effects. Altogether, these findings offer important insights into the best ways to measure global metacognition and further our understanding of the updating and formation of global metacognitive beliefs.

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