One type of cognitive self-evaluation predicts proneness to hallucinations, another type does not

What is it about?

People are capable of evaluating their own perceptual and cognitive performance in terms of how well they think they have performed the task or how confident they are in correctness or quality of this -- a process called metacognition. Another cognitive phenomenon quite common among general population (and also of course in many neuropsychiatric patients) is experience of hallucinations -- for example, people see or hear objects or events that are actually not out there. Normal people can experience presence of objects they are prepared to expect even though these objects are not physically present. In this study we showed that proneness to hallucinate an expected object is related to how correctly you evaluate your success in a perception task (the better the self-evaluation, the less hallucinations). However, hallucination proneness is unrelated to how well you evaluate your evaluations of the perception task success. Metacognition is not a unitary mechanism.

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Why is it important?

This research shows that in areas where metacognitive self-evaluations are used -- forensic psychology of eyewitness reliability, clinical psychology of self-appraisal, educational psychology of pupil self-awareness -- one must take care of differentiating between different kinds of metacognitive evaluations. One metacognitive type need not predict another. Moreover, depending on what is the purpose of the practical intervention or interview, a suitable, relevant type of metacognitive task should be applied.

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