Avoiding the conflict: Metacognitive awareness drives the selection of low-demand contexts

Previous research attempted to explain how humans strategically adapt behavior in order to achieve successful task performance. Recently, it has been suggested that 1 potential strategy is to avoid tasks that are too demanding. Here, we report 3 experiments that investigate the empirically neglected...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance Vol. 43; no. 7; p. 1397
Main Authors Desender, Kobe, Buc Calderon, Cristian, Van Opstal, Filip, Van den Bussche, Eva
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.07.2017
Subjects
Adolescent
Adult
Awareness - physiology
Choice Behavior - physiology
Conflict (Psychology)
Executive Function - physiology
Female
Humans
Male
Metacognition - physiology
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Repetition Priming - physiology
Subliminal Stimulation
Young Adult
Online AccessGet more information

Cover

More Information
Summary:Previous research attempted to explain how humans strategically adapt behavior in order to achieve successful task performance. Recently, it has been suggested that 1 potential strategy is to avoid tasks that are too demanding. Here, we report 3 experiments that investigate the empirically neglected role of metacognitive awareness in this process. In these experiments, participants could freely choose between performing a task in either a high-demand or a low-demand context. Using subliminal priming, we ensured that participants were not aware of the visual stimuli creating these different demand contexts. Our results showed that participants who noticed a difference in task difficulty (i.e., metacognitive aware participants) developed a clear preference for the low-demand context. In contrast, participants who experienced no difference in task difficulty (i.e., metacognitive unaware participants) based their choices on variables unrelated to cognitive demand (e.g., the color or location associated with a context), and did not develop a preference for the low-demand context. Crucially, this pattern was found despite identical task performance in both metacognitive awareness groups. A multiple regression approach confirmed that metacognitive awareness was the main factor driving the preference for low-demand contexts. These results argue for an important role of metacognitive awareness in the strategic avoidance of demanding tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record
ISSN:1939-1277
DOI:10.1037/xhp0000391