Task dependent conflict has been shown to reduce
metacognitive judgements of confidence and prolong
response times in various reasoning tasks. For this study a
modified version of the base rate task was used to induce
conflict while measuring response times and judgements of
confidence. The aim of this experiment was to determine the
influence of different instruction conditions (reasoning
according to belief or according to mathematical probability)
on fluency and metacognitive judgements. As expected,
participants experienced higher levels of conflict when
reasoning according to mathematical probability even though
conflict effects were present in both conditions. Additionally,
higher believability items mitigated conflict influence while
reasoning in accordance with belief and increased it when
reasoning in accordance with mathematical probability. These
results enrich the growing field of metareasoning research and
are discussed as such.