Lucie Charles | Metacognitive bias in perception of voluntary action

Little is known about metacognition of action and whether it differs from metacognition for visual and auditory stimuli. Although one could argue that we have a privileged access to information about our own self and therefore better metacognitive representations of internally generated signals than of external events, experimental data suggest that humans have surprisingly poor awareness of their own actions. In this talk, I will present a series of studies comparing metacognition of action to perceptual metacognition, probing whether voluntary actions are associated with distinct metacognitive capacity than visual metacognition. Our results indicate that metacognitive sensitivity does not differ when judging voluntary actions compared to passive movements or visual signals. However, we observed a metacognitive bias towards overconfidence associated with judging one’s own voluntary movements. Taken together, these results provide empirical evidence for an illusory sense of confidence when introspecting one’s own motor actions.