Effects Of Social Cues On Metacognitive Monitoring And Control

People would face many choices and the basis for making choices and judging the choices is not only from the information provided by perceptual cues,but also from the information with reference to social cues.In metacognitive researches,the level of confidence is often used as a metacognitive monitoring indicator to determine whether the choice is correct or not;and which choice is made is an indicator of metacognitive control.Previous studies focused more on the effect of perceptual cues on metacognitive,and less on social cues as an important factor.Our study researched the role of social cues in the process of metacognitive monitoring and control from both explicit and implicit levels.This research used paired-linked learning materials composed of Russian words and corresponding item pictures.And it used the “ majority-selected situation ” stimulus variable as a social cue and experimented with an innovative research paradigm of judgment of confidence.Through 3 experiments with multi-stage tasks,this research revealed the interaction of monitoring and control in metacognitive.By introducing the eye-tracking technology to obtain implicit metacognitive data,this research realized the separation of explicit and implicit metacognition which revealed the processing mechanisms of metacognitive monitoring and control from both implicit and implicit levels.This study consists of three experiments: Experiment 1 examined the influence of social cues on metacognitive monitoring from the level of explicitness;Experiment 2 examined the influence of social cues on metacognitive control from the level of explicitness;Experiment3 was based on the previous two experiments that researched the impact of social cues on metacognitive monitoring,control,and the interrelationship between monitoring and control from levels of explicitness and implicitness.Through the experiments,we came up with the following conclusions:(1)Social cues affect the metacognitive monitoring.Individual's confidence is strongly influenced by social cues and could be expressed as “ believe in the others ”;the trend of explicit monitoring is consistent with implicit monitoring,and implicit monitoring is more accurate.(2)Social cues affect the metacognitive control.Individual's choice is slightly influenced by social cues,and people do not tend to change the choices they have made.This could be expressed as “ believe in oneself ”.The result of explicit control is consistent withthe implicit control process.(3)Social cues have an important influence on the interrelationship of metacognitive monitoring and control.Under the influence of social cues,the interrelation of metacognitive monitoring and control acts in this way: the level of confidence affects the subsequent behaviors,and whether changing the choice or not in turn serves the level of confidence.