Metacognition, agency and interoception tasks

The participant reports on their own cognition, action or body: confidence in future recall, the perceived time of an action, the sense that a limb or heartbeat is theirs; the correspondence between report and fact is the measure.

This family contains 5 tasks.

Body Ownership Illusion

Synchronous multisensory stimulation of a participant’s hidden body part and a visible fake or virtual counterpart induces illusory ownership of the artificial body part; proprioceptive drift, subjective ratings, and threat responses index the strength of the illusion. Engages 3 processes.

Feeling-of-Knowing

After failing to recall a studied item, participants rate the likelihood they could recognize the answer; the accuracy of these predictions (gamma correlation with recognition) indexes metacognitive monitoring of unretrieved memory. Engages 4 processes.

Heartbeat Detection

Participants count or discriminate their own heartbeats without external feedback; the correspondence between perceived and actual heartbeat counts (or discrimination accuracy) indexes interoceptive sensitivity. Engages 3 processes.

Intentional Binding

Participants judge the perceived time of a voluntary action and/or its sensory effect using a Libet clock; the temporal compression between action and effect (intentional binding) indexes the implicit sense of agency. Engages 3 processes.

Judgment-of-Learning

After studying each item, participants predict the likelihood they will recall it on a later test; calibration and resolution of these predictions index metacognitive monitoring of encoding. Engages 4 processes.