A comparison between implicit and explicit self-monitoring: temporal wagering versus confidence rating

Self-monitoring is a metacognitive activity that individuals control and alter their behavior based on the assessments of their own cognitive status, which involves both explicit and implicit dimensions. Confidence rating task is mostly used to measure explicit monitoring. Recently post-decision wagering (PDW) task has been developed to quantify implicit monitoring ability. Specifically, temporal wagering task estimates the decision confidence by measuring the waiting time subjects are willing to spend in waiting delayed reward, which is called wagering time (WT). The index has only been applied in animals experiment so far, but it values in deeply exploring the underlying mechanism of metacognitive monitoring. Thus in this experiment, WT is tested whether it fits on measuring human’s implicit monitoring ability. Results show that there are significantly positive correlation between WT and confidence. Moreover, there are several consistent effects showing metacognitive features in both WT and confidence—being able to measure metacognitive sensitivity and metacognitive efficiency; predicting the decision accuracy as well as serial dependence effect. All results have illustrated that WT indeed can be a good proxy of confidence and therefore provide an effective measure to study metacognitive monitoring on human. It can also help instruct the clinical treatments of psychiatric patients with deficits in self-monitoring.We apply a within-subject design in which both temporal wagering task and confidence rating task are used. 3600 trials were colleccted from 30 subjects (average age = 22.1, sd = 0.84). Half of the trials are temporal wagering data.