Timing Is Everything: Effects Of Temporal Delay Of Confidence Judgments In Memory Decision-Making
Abstract
Metacognitive confidence judgments are frequently adopted as a measure of certainty in decision-making tasks, but the mechanisms that underly these judgments have been long debated. In this work, we investigate the effect of the timing of confidence judgments in memory decisions by querying confidence immediately after, with a 3-second delay, or in a separate phase within an associative recognition task. An additional control condition did not probe confidence judgments at all to investigate how metacognitive monitoring may influence the memory decision-making process itself. The results indicate changes in memory performance and response times in conditions where confidence judgments were made, as well as a stronger association between confidence and accuracy when confidence was probed following a 3-second delay. We discuss the implications of these results regarding post- decision processing of metacognitive confidence and the bidirectional relationship between memory and metacognition.