Figure 2

Independence of implicit and explicit metacognitive sensitivities. (a) Explicit metacognition task. Representative trial of the explicit metacognition task: after reporting their orientation judgment, participants were asked to report their confidence in this orientation judgment on a scale from 1 (guess) to 6 (certainty). Feedback was delivered at the end of each trial. (b) Sensitivity of explicit metacognition. The sensitivity of explicit metacognition was measured using the M-ratio, which quantifies the amount of decision information available to the confidence judgment, here depicted as the difference between type 1 (decision) and type 2 (confidence) ROC curves³⁵. (c) Implicit metacognitive task. Representative trial of the implicit metacognition task: after reporting their orientation judgment for two successive RDM stimuli, participants were asked to report the stimulus for which they judged more likely to be correct. Feedback on the chosen stimulus was delivered at the end of each trial. (d) Sensitivity of implicit metacognition. The sensitivity of implicit metacognition was measured as the difference in slopes between psychometric functions corresponding to the chosen minus discarded stimuli, divided by the average slope across both conditions; a measure we refer to as CMI^25,30. (e) Independence between explicit and implicit metacognition. Metacognitive sensitivities were estimated for each participant separately in the explicit and implicit metacognition tasks. Measures are not correlated across participants suggesting they relate to independent metacognitive processes (see Table S3). Stars indicate significance: *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, and ***P < 0.001.