The cognitive architecture of temporal metacognition

Metacognition, which is the introspective ability to reason about one's own cognition, has long been investigated in perceptual and memory domains. Recent studies have investigated this ability within metric domains which include time, space and numerosity. While these studies demonstrate the human capability of keeping track of one's own cognition as it relates to these metric domains, no study thus far has investigated the cognitive architecture of this generalized metric error monitoring ability. The present dissertation investigates the different influences on the temporal error monitoring ability as a special case of metric metacognition, which includes keeping track of one's own temporal error magnitude (i.e., the extend of under or over estimating a target duration) and direction (i.e., under or overshooting the target duration) under two categories including (1) the exogenous and (2) endogenous factors. Study 1 (Chapter 2) investigates the effect of these two kinds of influences in a complementary way by testing the endogenous and exogenous feedback on global ability of temporal error monitoring. As a potential exogenous factor, Study 2 (Chapter 3) investigates whether the diminishing effect of working memory (WM) load documented previously for the perceptual metacognition applies to the temporal error monitoring ability. Finally, Study 3 (Chapter 4) investigates different endogenous factors (e.g., motor action, error ownership and belief of error owning) on the temporal error monitoring ability. Overall, results of the first study demonstrated no consistent effect of external feedback on trial-by-trial (online) temporal error monitoring ability while also pointing to the distinction between the online and global temporal error monitoring ability (i.e., reporting the average bias in the overall timing performance). Further, the second study pointed to no diminishing effect of WM load on online temporal error monitoring ability. Finally, the third study demonstrated the differential effect of motor action and belief of owning the temporal error on confidence and error directionality judgments as the two components of temporal error monitoring ability. Altogether, the present dissertation (1) demonstrated the distinction between online and global forms of temporal awareness (2) highlighted differential characteristics of temporal awareness with respect to the perceptual metacognition and (3) discovered the distinct characteristics of error magnitude and direction monitoring as two components of temporal error monitoring ability.