Metacognition in Human Factors: The Rewards and Consequences of Repeated Assessment

Abstract

Recent publications have encouraged researchers to consider how metacognition affects users’ judgments of usability and workload by integrating metacognitive assessments with traditional testing paradigms. However, the repercussions of collecting these measures concurrently are unknown. We used a visual search task to determine how the frequency of metacognitive assessments affected metacognitive accuracy and performance. Frequent assessments did not impact performance on the focal task; however, they did reduce the accuracy of participants’ metacognitive judgments by about 7%. This finding suggests that researchers should consider context when selecting a metacognitive assessment strategy.