Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper uses the signal detection theory (SDT) to investigate the contribution of visual information to two monitoring-dependent functions, metacognitive awareness of errors and error corrections. Data from two experiments show that complete removal of visual outcome results in a mild decrease in error awareness and a much more significant decrease in correction rates. Partially restoring visual information by including positional information (as in masked password typing) causes a modest but statistically significant improvement in correction performance. Interestingly, participants treat the change to the quality of information differently across the tasks, with more conservative behavior (avoiding false alarms) in the correction task. These findings show the SDT’s ability to quantify, in a graded manner, the contribution of specific types of information to monitoring in complex tasks, while also providing additional information about how participants handle the change to the quality of information in a task-dependent manner.