Feelings of Culpability: Just Following Orders Versus Making the Decision Oneself.

In five experiments (N = 1,490), participants were asked to imagine themselves as programmers of self-driving cars who had to decide how to program the car to respond in a potential accident: spare the driver or spare pedestrians. Alternatively, participants imagined that they were a mayor grappling with difficult moral dilemmas concerning COVID-19. Either they, themselves, had to decide how to program the car or which COVID-19 policy to implement (high-agency condition) or they were told by their superior how to act (low-agency condition). After learning that a tragic outcome occurred because of their action, participants reported their felt culpability. Although we expected people to feel less culpable about the outcome if they acted in accordance with their superior's injunction than if they made the decision themselves, participants actually felt more culpable when they followed their superior's order. Some possible reasons for this counterintuitive finding are discussed.

Stress and imagining future selves: resolve in the hot/cool framework.

Although Ainslie dismisses the hot/cool framework as pertaining only to suppression, it actually also has interesting implications for resolve. Resolve focally involves access to our future selves. This access is a cool system function linked to episodic memory. Thus, factors negatively affecting the cool system, such as stress, are predicted to impact two seemingly unrelated capabilities: willpower and episodic memory.

Memory, stress, and the hippocampal hypothesis: Firefighters' recollections of the fireground.

Nadel, Jacobs, and colleagues have postulated that human memory under conditions of extremely high stress is "special." In particular, episodic memories are thought to be susceptible to impairment, and possibly fragmentation, attributable to hormonally based dysfunction occurring selectively in the hippocampal system. While memory for highly salient and self-relevant events should be better than the memory for less central events, an overall nonmonotonic decrease in spatio/temporal episodic memory as stress approaches traumatic levels is posited. Testing human memory at extremely high levels of stress, however, is difficult and reports are rare. Firefighting is the most stressful civilian occupation in our society. In the present study, we asked New York City firefighters to recall everything that they could upon returning from fires they had just fought. Communications during all fires were recorded, allowing verification of actual events. Our results confirmed that recall was, indeed, impaired with increasing stress. A nonmonotonic relation was observed consistent with the posited inverted u-shaped memory-stress function. Central details about emergency situations were better recalled than were more schematic events, but both kinds of events showed the memory decrement with high stress. There was no evidence of fragmentation. Self-relevant events were recalled nearly five times better than events that were not self-relevant. These results provide confirmation that memories encoded under conditions of extremely high stress are, indeed, special and are impaired in a manner that is consistent with the Nadel/Jacobs hippocampal hypothesis.

Learning from Errors.

Although error avoidance during learning appears to be the rule in American classrooms, laboratory studies suggest that it may be a counterproductive strategy, at least for neurologically typical students. Experimental investigations indicate that errorful learning followed by corrective feedback is beneficial to learning. Interestingly, the beneficial effects are particularly salient when individuals strongly believe that their error is correct: Errors committed with high confidence are corrected more readily than low-confidence errors. Corrective feedback, including analysis of the reasoning leading up to the mistake, is crucial. Aside from the direct benefit to learners, teachers gain valuable information from errors, and error tolerance encourages students' active, exploratory, generative engagement. If the goal is optimal performance in high-stakes situations, it may be worthwhile to allow and even encourage students to commit and correct errors while they are in low-stakes learning situations rather than to assiduously avoid errors at all costs.

Tip-of-the-tongue states predict enhanced feedback processing and subsequent memory.

This article investigates the relations among the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state, event related potentials (ERPs) to correct feedback to questions, and subsequent memory. ERPs were used to investigate neurocognitive responses to feedback to general information questions for which participants had expressed either being or not being in a TOT state. For questions in which participants were unable to answer within 3 s, they indicated whether they were experiencing a TOT state and then were immediately provided with the correct answer. Feedback during a TOT state, as opposed to not knowing the answer, was associated with enhanced positivity over centro-parietal electrodes 250-700 ms post-feedback, and this enhanced positivity mediated a positive relationship between TOTs and later recall. Although effects of increased semantic access during TOT states cannot be ruled out, these results suggest that information received during TOT states elicits enhanced processing-suggestive of curiosity-leading to enhanced learning of studied material.

The relation between the sense of agency and the experience of flow.

This article investigates the relation between people's feelings of agency and their feelings of flow. In the dominant model describing how people are able to assess their own agency-the comparator model of agency-when the person's intentions match perfectly to what happens, the discrepancy between intention and outcome is zero, and the person is thought to interpret this lack of discrepancy as being in control. The lack of perceived push back from the external world seems remarkably similar to the state that has been described as a state of flow. However, when we used a computer game paradigm to investigate the relation between people's feelings of agency and their feelings of flow, we found a dissociation between these two states. Although these two states may, in some ways, seem to be similar, our data indicate that they are governed by different principles and phenomenology.

Studying in the region of proximal learning reduces mind wandering.

Insofar as mind wandering has been linked to poor learning, finding ways to reduce the propensity to mind wander should have implications for improving learning. We investigated the possibility that studying materials at an appropriate level of difficulty with respect to the individual's capabilities-that is, studying in the region of proximal learning (RPL)-might reduce mind wandering. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were probed for their attentional state while they studied blocks of English-Spanish word pairs that were (a) easy, (b) in the RPL, or (c) difficult. We found that studying materials in the RPL was associated with reduced mind wandering. Test performance on items studied while mind wandering was also poorer. In Experiment 3, we investigated the relation between differences in participants' mastery and mind wandering. We found that high performers mind wandered more when studying the easier word pairs, whereas low performers mind wandered more when studying the difficult items. These results indicate that the RPL is specific to the individual's level of mastery and that mind wandering occurs when people are outside that region.

On Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks.

Although older adults rarely outperform young adults on learning tasks, in the study reported here they surpassed their younger counterparts not only by answering more semantic-memory general-information questions correctly, but also by better correcting their mistakes. While both young and older adults exhibited a hypercorrection effect, correcting their high-confidence errors more than their low-confidence errors, the effect was larger for young adults. Whereas older adults corrected high-confidence errors to the same extent as did young adults, they outdid the young in also correcting their low-confidence errors. Their event-related potentials point to an attentional explanation: Both groups showed a strong attention-related P3a in conjunction with high-confidence-error feedback, but the older adults also showed strong P3as to low-confidence-error feedback. Indeed, the older adults were able to rally their attentional resources to learn the true answers regardless of their original confidence in the errors and regardless of their familiarity with the answers.

Metacognition of agency and theory of mind in adults with high functioning autism.

We investigated metacognition of agency in adults with high functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS) using a computer task in which participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the downward moving X's and avoid the O's. They were then asked to make judgments of performance and judgments of agency. Objective control was either undistorted, or distorted by adding turbulence (i.e., random noise) or a time Lag between the mouse and cursor movements. Participants with HFA/AS used sensorimotor cues available in the turbulence and lag conditions to a lesser extent than control participants in making their judgments of agency. Furthermore, the failure to use these internal diagnostic cues to their own agency was correlated with decrements in a theory of mind task. These findings suggest that a reduced sensitivity to veridical internal cues about the sense of agency is related to mentalizing impairments in autism.

Anatomical coupling between distinct metacognitive systems for memory and visual perception.

A recent study found that, across individuals, gray matter volume in the frontal polar region was correlated with visual metacognition capacity (i.e., how well one's confidence ratings distinguish between correct and incorrect judgments). A question arises as to whether the putative metacognitive mechanisms in this region are also used in other metacognitive tasks involving, for example, memory. A novel psychophysical measure allowed us to assess metacognitive efficiency separately in a visual and a memory task, while taking variations in basic task performance capacity into account. We found that, across individuals, metacognitive efficiencies positively correlated between the two tasks. However, voxel-based morphometry analysis revealed distinct brain structures for the two kinds of metacognition. Replicating a previous finding, variation in visual metacognitive efficiency was correlated with volume of frontal polar regions. However, variation in memory metacognitive efficiency was correlated with volume of the precuneus. There was also a weak correlation between visual metacognitive efficiency and precuneus volume, which may account for the behavioral correlation between visual and memory metacognition (i.e., the precuneus may contain common mechanisms for both types of metacognition). However, we also found that gray matter volumes of the frontal polar and precuneus regions themselves correlated across individuals, and a formal model comparison analysis suggested that this structural covariation was sufficient to account for the behavioral correlation of metacognition in the two tasks. These results highlight the importance of the precuneus in higher-order memory processing and suggest that there may be functionally distinct metacognitive systems in the human brain.

The cognitive antecedents and motivational consequences of the feeling of being in the zone.

The feeling of being in the zone (related to "flow") is marked by an elevated yet effortless sense of concentration. Prior research suggests that feelings of being in the zone are strongest when the demand posed by a task matches one's level of ability (i.e., the balance hypothesis). In the present article, we tested this hypothesis using a novel experimental paradigm. By collecting numerous zone judgments for each participant, we were able to examine intra-individual sources of variance that explain why people often feel more or less in-the-zone on the same task from one moment to the next. The results of two experiments provide support for what we have termed the balance-plus hypothesis, which posits that zone experiences are strongest (Experiments 1-2) and have the greatest motivational force (Experiment 2) when the balance between task demand and ability is accompanied by positive assessments of one's own performance.

Learning from errors versus explicit instruction in preparation for a test that counts.

BACKGROUND: Although the generation of errors has been thought, traditionally, to impair learning, recent studies indicate that, under particular feedback conditions, the commission of errors may have a beneficial effect. AIMS: This study investigates the teaching strategies that facilitate learning from errors. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This 2-year study, involving two cohorts of ~88 students each, contrasted a learning-from-errors (LFE) with an explicit instruction (EI) teaching strategy in a multi-session implementation directed at improving student performance on the high-stakes New York State Algebra 1 Regents examination. In the LFE condition, instead of receiving instruction on 4 sessions, students took mini-tests. Their errors were isolated to become the focus of 4 teacher-guided feedback sessions. In the EI condition, teachers explicitly taught the mathematical material for all 8 sessions. RESULTS: Teacher time-on in the LFE condition produced a higher rate of learning than did teacher time-on in the EI condition. The learning benefit in the LFE condition was, however, inconsistent across teachers. Second-by-second analyses of classroom activities, directed at isolating learning-relevant differences in teaching style revealed that a highly interactive mode of engaging the students in understanding their errors was more conducive to learning than was teaching directed at getting to the correct solution, either by lecturing about corrections or by interaction focused on corrections. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that engaging the students interactively to focus on errors, and the reasons for them, facilitates productive failure and learning from errors.

Metacognition of agency: proximal action and distal outcome.

The cues contributing to people's metacognitions of agency were investigated in two experiments in which people played a computer game that involved trying to "touch", via a mouse moving a cursor, downward scrolling X's (Experiment 1), or trying to "explode" the downward scrolling X's (Experiment 2). Both experiments varied (a) proximal action-related information by either introducing or not introducing Turbulence into the mouse controls and (b) distal outcome-related information such that touched X's "exploded" either 100 or 75 % of the time. Both variables affected people's judgments of agency (JOAs), but the effect was different. First, the decrement in feelings of agency was greater with the proximal variable than with distal variable. Second, while the proximal variable always had a large direct effect on JOAs, even taking judgments of performance (JOPs) into account, JOPs completely accounted for the effect of the distal variable in Experiment 1, where the instructions were just to touch the X's. And even in Experiment 2, in which the instructions were to explode the X's, the direct effect of the distal variable on JOAs was small. These data indicate that these two cues exhibit different psychological profiles. The proximal action-related information is a diagnostic cue to agency indicating the match between one's own intentions and actions. Internal monitoring of intentions is necessary and so the self is implicated. However, distal outcome can be largely monitored using information external to the agent, and so-while it is used by people to make agency judgments-it is a non-diagnostic cue.

Children's naive theories of intelligence influence their metacognitive judgments.

Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (M(age) = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders (M(age) = 10.39) read texts presented in easy- or difficult-to-encode fonts. The more children in both grades viewed intelligence as fixed, the less likely they were to interpret effortful or difficult encoding as a sign of increasing mastery and the more likely they were to report lower levels of comprehension as their perceived effort increased. This suggests that children may use naive theories of intelligence to make motivationally relevant inferences earlier than previously thought.

Curiosity: The effects of feedback and confidence on the desire to know.

In 10 experiments, we investigated the relations among curiosity and people's confidence in their answers to general information questions after receiving different kinds of feedback: yes/no feedback, true or false informational feedback under uncertainty, or no feedback. The results showed that when people had given a correct answer, yes/no feedback resulted in a near complete loss of curiosity. Upon learning they had made an error via yes/no feedback, curiosity increased, especially for high-confidence errors. When people were given true feedback under uncertainty (they were given the correct answer but were not told that it was correct), curiosity increased for high-confidence errors but was unchanged for correct responses. In contrast, when people were given false feedback under uncertainty, curiosity increased for high-confidence correct responses but was unchanged for errors. These results, taken as a whole, are consistent with the region of proximal learning model which proposes that while curiosity is minimal when people are completely certain that they know the answer, it is maximal when people believe that they almost know. Manipulations that drew participants toward this region of "almost knowing" resulted in increased curiosity. A serendipitous result was the finding (replicated four times in this study) that when no feedback was given, people were more curious about high-confidence errors than they were about equally high-confidence correct answers. It was as if they had some knowledge, tapped selectively by their feelings of curiosity, that there was something special (and possibly amiss) about high-confidence errors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural correlates of people's hypercorrection of their false beliefs.

Despite the intuition that strongly held beliefs are particularly difficult to change, the data on error correction indicate that general information errors that people commit with a high degree of belief are especially easy to correct. This finding is called the hypercorrection effect. The hypothesis was tested that the reason for hypercorrection stems from enhanced attention and encoding that results from a metacognitive mismatch between the person's confidence in their responses and the true answer. This experiment, which is the first to use imaging to investigate the hypercorrection effect, provided support for this hypothesis, showing that both metacognitive mismatch conditions-that in which high confidence accompanies a wrong answer and that in which low confidence accompanies a correct answer-revealed anterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus activations. Only in the high confidence error condition, however, was an error that conflicted with the true answer mentally present. And only the high confidence error condition yielded activations in the right TPJ and the right dorsolateral pFC. These activations suggested that, during the correction process after error commission, people (1) were entertaining both the false belief as well as the true belief (as in theory of mind tasks, which also manifest the right TPJ activation) and (2) may have been suppressing the unwanted, incorrect information that they had, themselves, produced (as in think/no-think tasks, which also manifest dorsolateral pFC activation). These error-specific processes as well as enhanced attention because of metacognitive mismatch appear to be implicated.

Making related errors facilitates learning, but learners do not know it.

Producing an error, so long as it is followed by corrective feedback, has been shown to result in better retention of the correct answers than does simply studying the correct answers from the outset. The reasons for this surprising finding, however, have not been investigated. Our hypothesis was that the effect might occur only when the errors produced were related to the targeted correct response. In Experiment 1, participants studied either related or unrelated word pairs, manipulated between participants. Participants either were given the cue and target to study for 5 or 10 s or generated an error in response to the cue for the first 5 s before receiving the correct answer for the final 5 s. When the cues and targets were related, error-generation led to the highest correct retention. However, consistent with the hypothesis, no benefit was derived from generating an error when the cue and target were unrelated. Latent semantic analysis revealed that the errors generated in the related condition were related to the target, whereas they were not related to the target in the unrelated condition. Experiment 2 replicated these findings in a within-participants design. We found, additionally, that people did not know that generating an error enhanced memory, even after they had just completed the task that produced substantial benefits.

Alpha Suppression Is Associated with the Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) State Whereas Alpha Expression Is Associated with Knowing That One Does Not Know.

The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state is a spontaneously occurring metacognitive state that indicates that the answer to a query is almost, but not quite, at hand, i.e., that resolution is imminent. Since the time of William James, a distinctive feeling of nagging frustration has been observed to be associated with TOT states. On a more positive note, TOT states are also associated with intense goal-directed curiosity and with a strong desire to know that translates into successful mental action. The present study showed that prior to the presentation of resolving feedback to verbal queries-if the individual was in a TOT state-alpha suppression was in evidence in the EEG. This alpha suppression appears to be a marker of a spontaneously occurring, conscious, and highly motivating goal-directed internal metacognitive state. At the same time, alpha expression in the same time period was associated with the feeling of not knowing, indicating a more discursive state. Both alpha and alpha suppression were observed broadly across centro-parietal scalp electrodes and disappeared immediately upon presentation of the resolving feedback. Analyses indicated that the occurrence of alpha suppression was associated with participants' verbal affirmations of being in a TOT state, which is also related to subsequent expression of a late positivity when feedback is provided, and to enhanced memory.

Dissociating neural correlates of action monitoring and metacognition of agency.

Judgments of agency refer to people's self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring, which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) between observed states and expected states. Presumably, people form judgments of agency by metacognitively reflecting on the output of their action monitoring and then consciously inferring the extent to which they caused the action in question. Although a number of previous imaging studies have been directed at action monitoring, none have assessed judgments of agency as a potentially separate process. The present fMRI study used an agency paradigm that not only allowed us to examine the brain activity associated with action monitoring but that also enabled us to investigate those regions associated with metacognition of agency. Regarding action monitoring, we found that being "out of control" during the task (i.e., detection of a discrepancy between observed and expected states) was associated with increased brain activity in the right TPJ, whereas being "in control" was associated with increased activity in the pre-SMA, rostral cingulate zone, and dorsal striatum (regions linked to self-initiated action). In contrast, when participants made self-reflective metacognitive judgments about the extent of their own control (i.e., judgments of agency) compared with when they made judgments that were not about control (i.e., judgments of performance), increased activity was observed in the anterior PFC, a region associated with self-reflective processing. These results indicate that action monitoring is dissociable from people's conscious self-attributions of control.

Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states: retrieval, behavior, and experience.

The tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT) is the feeling that accompanies temporary inaccessibility of an item that a person is trying to retrieve. TOTs have been studied experimentally since the seminal work of Brown and McNeill (1966). TOTs are experiences that accompany some failed or slow retrievals, and they can result in changes in retrieval behavior itself, allowing us to study the interplay among experience, retrieval, and behavior. We often attribute the experience of the TOT to the unretrieved target, but TOTs are based on a variety of cues, heuristics, or sources of evidence, such as partial information, related information, and cue familiarity, that predict the likelihood of overcoming retrieval failure. We present a synthesis of the direct-access view, which accounts for retrieval failure, and the heuristic-metacognitive view, which accounts for the experience of the TOT. We offer several avenues for future research and applications of TOT theory and data.