Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to monitor our cognitive performance (i.e., metacognitive monitoring) is central to efficient functioning.Research investigating this ability has focused largely on tasks that rely exclusively on internal processes. However, our day-to-day cognitive activities often consist of mixes of internal and external processes. For example, we can offload memory demandsonto external media (e.g., computers, paper). In the present investigation, we expand research on the metacognitive monitoringof performance to this domain. Specifically, we examine participant’s ability to accurately monitor their performance in tasksthat require them to rely on only their internal processes (e.g., short term memory to remember a series of letters) and tasks thatrequire them to rely on both (e.g., paper and pencil to remember a series of letters). Results suggest that the former results insuperior monitoring relative to the latter. Implications for understanding metacognition in more distributed cognitive domainswill be discussed.