1.

Individual differences in decision processing and confidence judgments in comparative judgment

tasks: The role of cognitive styles
Keywords: Cognitive styles; Personal Need for Structure; Personal Fear of Invalidity; Need for
Cognition; Confidence; Decision processing
Gap- although there is no obviously right answer to these social judgment tasks. Conversely, each of the
current tasks involved two response options provided to the respondents for their selection of an (clearly
right or wrong) answer. Perhaps the structured nature of the decision tasks used in this study influenced
all participants to respond in a more simplistic, structured manner.
Participants- 419 introductory psychology students at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada
(267 women, 152 men; mean age = 20.15, SD = 4.42) answered a questionnaire that included the
individual differences measures described below. Of these students, 104 individuals (74 women and 30
men) participated in the experimental portion of the study.

2. Does interaction matter? Testing whether a confidence heuristic can replace interaction in
collective decision-making
Keywords: Collective decision-making Interaction Confidence Reaction time Heuristic Perception
Metacognition Signal detection theory Computational
Gap- how do individuals estimate the credibility of each other’s opinions, and how good are they at doing
so? how do individuals map ‘internal’ variables onto ‘external’ variables? how should they solve this
mapping problem so as to facilitate collective performance?
Participants- In total, fifty-eight participants (29 dyads) took part in the non-verbal 14 Consciousness and
Cognition 26 (2014) 13–23 (14 dyads) and the verbal (15 dyads) conditions. All participants were healthy
adult males (mean age = 23.5 years, SD = 2.8 years) with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. The
members of each dyad knew each other before taking part in the experiment.

3. Neural correlates of metacognitive ability and of feeling confident: a large-scale fMRI study
Key words: metacognition; fMRI; confidence; decision making; social neuroscience
Gap-Future studies should further investigate if metacognitive ability relies on similar brain regions
across a wide variety of tasks. it seems worthwhile for future research to consider affective processes as a
biasing factor in metacognitive self-evaluation
Participants- In total, 332 participants participated in the study, which was part of the ReSource project.
Twenty-four participants had to be excluded due to study dropout (n ¼ 5), dropout from MRI
measurements (n ¼ 1) or missing data due to technical, scheduling or health issues (n ¼ 18), leaving a
final sample of 308 participants (age mean- ¼ 41 years, s.d. ¼ 9, 178 female, 283 right-handed), who
completed the task successfully. All participants gave written informed consent in accordance with the
declaration of Helsinki. The study was approved by the Ethics committees of the University of Leipzig
and the Humboldt University Berlin.