Linking metacognition and mindreading: Evidence from autism and dual-task investigations.

“A power calculation using G Power3 (Faul et al., 2007) revealed that, to detect a betweencondition (single/dual task) difference in judgment-of-confidence accuracy of d 0.88, on 80% of occasions (Cohen, 1992) using two-tailed tests, 22 participants per condition were required.”

“All participants completed the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale for Intelligence-II (Wechsler, 1999), which provides verbal, performance, and full-scale IQ scores, as well as two widely used measures of mindreading (see details below).”

“…with and without ASD (e.g., Wilson et al., 2014), is associated with the number of ASD traits shown by individuals in large population studies (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), and is correlated with other measures of mindreading even after the influence of IQ is statistically controlled (e.g.,…”

“The task, which is based on Heider and Simmel (1944), required participants to describe interactions between a large red triangle and a small blue triangle, as portrayed in a series of silent video clips.”

“This allows a more graded interpretation of the data than is possible using p values or effect sizes alone (e.g., Dienes, 2014; Rouder, Speckman, Sun, Morey, & Iverson, 2009) and is particularly useful for interpreting null findings because it provides an index of the extent to which data supports…”

““Type II” signal detection theory was used to characterize the metacognitive sensitivity of participants’ confidence reports to their correct or incorrect judgments using the meta-d= statistic (see Fleming & Lau, 2014; Maniscalco & Lau, 2012).”

“Where t tests were used, we report Cohen’s d values as an index of effect size ( 0.20 small effect, 0.50 moderate effect; 0.80 large effect; Cohen, 1969).”

“The parents of all participants completed the Social Responsiveness Scale-II (Constantino & Gruber, 2012) to provide an index of number of ASD features/ traits manifested in participants (T scores of 50 represent the population average; T scores 59 indicate clinically significant levels of ASD…”

“Each transcript was scored on a scale of zero to two for accuracy (including reference to specific mental states), based on the criteria outlined in Abell et al. (2000).”

“cesses rather than second-order, genuinely metacognitive processes (Carruthers, 2011). That is, it has been said that instead of monitoring their own states of certainty or uncertainty, as most comparative psychologists assume (a second-order, metacognitive, process), the animals can succeed in these tasks through fir…”

“In this new secondary task, after the presentation of each sentence from the Cambridge Mindreading Voice Battery (Golan et al., 2006), participants heard the words “male” and “female” and had to report verbally which sex the speaker of the sentence had been.”

“…example, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder diagnosed on the basis of significant impairments in social-communication and behavioral flexibility (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and is characterized unambiguously by diminished mindreading ability (e.g., Happé, 1995).”

“So a primary discrimination task that is executed fluently will result in a state of positive affect, which is known in humans to increase risk-taking (Gasper & Clore, 2000).”

“For we know that easy tasks are ones that are performed fluently, and fluency is known to give rise to positive valence, whereas disfluent tasks cause negative valence (Casasanto & Chrysikou, 2011; Carr, Rotteveel, & Winkielman, 2016).”

“…Baron-Cohen, & Simons, 2016; Grainger, Williams, & Lind, 2016a, 2016b; Nicholson et al., 2019; Williams, Bergström, & Grainger, 2018; Williams & Happé, 2010; Williams & Happé, 2009; Wilkinson, Best, Minshew, & Strauss, 2010; Wojcik, Allen, Brown, & Souchay, 2011; Wojcik et al.,…”

“…of monitoring their own states of certainty or uncertainty, as most comparative psychologists assume (a second-order, metacognitive, process), the animals can succeed in these tasks through first-order (cognitive rather than metacognitive) kinds of risk-evaluation (Carruthers & Ritchie, 2012).”

“…Williams, Bergström, & Grainger, 2018; Williams & Happé, 2010; Williams & Happé, 2009; Wilkinson, Best, Minshew, & Strauss, 2010; Wojcik, Allen, Brown, & Souchay, 2011; Wojcik et al., 2014), so basing an effect size on the weighted effect size across previous studies was inappropriate, in our view.”

“Others have claimed that metacognition and mindreading rely on entirely distinct systems (two-systems theory; e.g., Nichols & Stich, 2003).”

“…& Simons, 2016; Grainger, Williams, & Lind, 2016a, 2016b; Nicholson et al., 2019; Williams, Bergström, & Grainger, 2018; Williams & Happé, 2010; Williams & Happé, 2009; Wilkinson, Best, Minshew, & Strauss, 2010; Wojcik, Allen, Brown, & Souchay, 2011; Wojcik et al., 2014), so basing an effect…”

“…Williams, Bergström, & Grainger, 2018; Williams & Happé, 2010; Williams & Happé, 2009; Wilkinson, Best, Minshew, & Strauss, 2010; Wojcik, Allen, Brown, & Souchay, 2011; Wojcik et al., 2014), so basing an effect size on the weighted effect size across previous studies was inappropriate, in our view.”

“…(e.g., Fernández-Abascal, Cabello, Fernández-Berrocal, & Baron-Cohen, 2013), clearly distinguishes groups of participants with and without ASD (e.g., Wilson et al., 2014), is associated with the number of ASD traits shown by individuals in large population studies (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 2001),…”

“The task, which is based on Heider and Simmel (1944), required participants to describe interactions between a large red triangle and a small blue triangle, as portrayed in a series of silent video clips.”

“In addition, a secondary mentalizing task (but not another, equivalently demanding task) interfered with explicit metacognitive judgments (Nicholson et al., 2021).”

“15 But van den Berg, Anandalingam, et al. (2016) used a procedure with adult humans very much like the gambling task employed with monkeys by Kornell et al. (2007) and with humans by Nicholson et al. (2021), except that confidence was measured at the same time as the primary discrimination judgment.”

“A frequent use case is between-subject designs in which performance levels might differ between participants and/or groups and which thus explicitly require a measures invariant to type 1 performance (Baird et al. 2014; Hauser et al. 2017; Sadeghi et al. 2017; Faivre et al. 2020; Hertz et al. 2020; Nicholson et al. 20…”

“…scenario, a mentalising task (but not a similarly demanding non-mentalising task) impairs the fidelity of (self-directed) confidence ratings on a metacognition task, indicating a sharing of cognitive resources between self-directed metacognition and mentalising about others (Nicholson et al., 2021).”

“To our knowledge, only three studies have employed these non-verbal measures in studies of metacognition in autism (Carpenter et al., 2019; Nicholson et al., 2019, 2021).”

“A ade m f r ep Nevertheless, the importance of metacognition and ‘introspective p i n -- no y gh ( ) I u e l the fully trained architecture to adaptively bail out of navigation decisions that it predicted may end in failure (Daftry et al. , 2016).”

“Assessing both implicit and explicit metacognition through judgement-of-con fi dence tasks of perceptual discrimination, and theory of mind through the animation task and the reading the mind in the eyes test, Nicholson et al .”

“Empirical studies have provided increasing support for commonalities between metacognition and theory of mind based on shared cognitive resources (Nicholson et al., 2021), overlapping brain structures (Vaccaro & Fleming, 2018), and overlapping developmental trajectories (Gopnik & Astington, 1988;…”

“However, studies using bias-free measures of metacognition have also produced mixed results, with some showing differences between autistic and non-autistic participants (Nicholson et al. 2020; van der Plas et al. 2021) and some showing no differences (Embon et al. 2023).”

“…monitoring and ToM, such as a recent study which revealed impaired uncertainty monitoring and ToM abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder compared to typically developing children and, across both groups, uncertainty monitoring was associated with ToM (Nicholson et al., 2021).”

“…studies in ASD led to mixed results; some research reports no differences between non-autistic and autistic participants’ metacogni - tion levels (Nicholson et al., 2021; Williams et al., 2018), while others suggest that they show several difficulties in metacognitive abilities (Maras et al.,…”

“…2018 ; Seow et al., 2021 ; Seow & Gillan, 2020 ; Benwell et al., 2022; Fox et al., 2023 ), schizophrenia (Hoven et al., 2019 ; Seow et al., 2021 ), nicotine dependence (Soutschek et al., 2022), autism spectrum disorder (Embon et al., 2023; Nicholson et al., 2020 ), and stress (Smith et al., 2024 ).”

“…between previous studies on metacognition, ToM, and autism, where some studies have found that autistic individuals experience difficulties in metacognition alongside their ToM deficits, 29,30,36 while others observed no association between impairments in ToM and metacognitive abilities.”