Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

As task demands increase, fewer cognitive resources remain for executing a task and monitoring one's own performance. This study investigates the point at which performance and metacognition (self-assessment) begin to diverge under increasing mental demand. Participants completed a dynamic visual tracking task in which they monitored target dots moving among distractors on a screen. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the number of target dots from two to four, among a total of eight dots. Participants were prompted to estimate their performance during the trial, prior to receiving feedback. After each trial, they also completed the Paas scale to assess perceived cognitive workload. Participants accurately assessed the quality of their performance during the task and detected changes in workload afterward. They were less accurate in their judgements at higher difficulty levels. This suggests that as task demands increase, an individual's ability to monitor task performance is reduced.