Christopher Stevens - Metacognition in spatial reasoning

Imagine you are on your way to a meeting in an unfamiliar place. How do you know that you are heading in the right direction? How do you know when you can find your own way and when you need more information (e.g. from a map or GPS)? Despite much research on spatial memory and navigation, extremely little is known about how people monitor the accuracy of their spatial memories and judgments.

Previous research has shown that the accuracy of a spatial judgment is dependent on one's viewpoint. For instance, viewpoints that are aligned with the intrinsic structure of a space result in more accurate judgments than misaligned viewpoints. In this talk, I will discuss a series of experiments investigating whether viewpoint characteristics also affect metacognitive monitoring. Participants were asked to assume a particular viewpoint within a known space and point to a target landmark. After giving their directional judgments, they were asked to indicate the uncertainty of their judgment by giving a confidence interval. The results revealed that confidence judgments are sensitive to viewpoint characteristics. However, people are also more overconfident when using more difficult viewpoints. This suggests that people can detect when a viewpoint is not optimal, but the difficulty of the spatial inference prevents them from fully accounting for its effect on performance. Finally, the direction of the target with respect to one's body (i.e. in front or behind) is a salient confidence cue. This factor affects confidence even in cases when it does not affect performance. The results suggest that people do use viewpoint characteristics as confidence cues when making spatial inferences.