Previous research has shown that eliciting retrospective confidence ratings during problem-solving enhances performance in high self-efficacy individuals but impairs performance in low self-efficacy individuals. In the current study, we examined whether judgments of solvability, a metacognitive rating made prior to participants’ first-order responses are similarly reactive and whether, like retrospective confidence ratings, this effect is moderated by pre-existing self-efficacy. In two experiments, we showed that judgments of solvability are reactive, but this effect is not moderated by pre-existing self-efficacy. We argue that eliciting metacognitive ratings prior to a participant’s response changes metacognitive control, without necessarily activating self-evaluative thoughts. These results are encouraging for the use of judgments of solvability as an education intervention.

Objective Self-awareness Theory (Duval & Wicklund,1972) proposes that self-evaluation increases an individual’sawareness of any discrepancy between their currentperformance and an internal goal. In the current study weprompted self-evaluation throughout an intelligence test(Analysis-Synthesis Test – AST) using confidence ratings(CR). AST performance, the extent to which participantsincidentally learnt task-relevant rules (learning rules wasunnecessary because they were provided), self-efficacy, andgoals, were assessed. The results indicated an effect ofperforming CR on both performance and rule learning, butthe effect depended on self-efficacy. Compared to matchedcontrols (n=45), participants who performed CR (n=41) andhad high self-efficacy performed better on the AST butlearnt fewer rules. Performing CR had no effect onparticipants low in self-efficacy. This suggests that self-evaluation interacts with self-efficacy to modifyparticipants’ goals, specifically CR appear to shiftindividuals high in self-efficacy from a mastery goal to aperformance goal.

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing contingencies and demands over time. It is often assessed by complex problem solving tasks (e.g., microworld simulations), which require individuals to maintain a goal state over trials. Yet typically analyses summarises performance by mean accuracy per person, which assumes performance is a constant and ignores the trial-by-trial trajectory of individuals that reveal strategy . We tested n = 83 psychology students aged 16 to 45 in a microworld task under different conditions of stochasticity and delay. We modelled trial-by-trial performance according to a prospective model of the true task contingencies versus a reactive strategy adapting to feedback from the last trial,. Most individuals (~66%) appeared to adopt a reactive strategy, however when the task contingencies were immediate, people were more likely to act prospectively. Performance in the microworld task depends on the strategy which varies by person and with the task contingencies.

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages. Each dataset is accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (which is available at https://osf.io/s46pr/) contained 145 datasets with data from more than 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. Here we show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimations of several foundational confidence-related effects.