Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

Fall 12-3-2025

Faculty Advisor(s)

Aaron Schurger

Abstract

Research has suggested that the ability to think about our own thinking (metacognition) and the ability to understand others’ mental states (mindreading) may rely on the same cognitive resources. A study by Nicholson and colleagues (2021) found that people’s metacognitive accuracy decreased when they performed a mind-reading task at the same time, implying that the two processes interfered with each other. However, that conclusion is dependent on the assumption that the mind-reading task and a control task were equally difficult. If the mind-reading task was more difficult, having a lower performance could reflect general task difficulty rather than shared cognitive mechanisms. To address this, our study created a new auditory control task designed to replicate the mind-reading task in both type and level of difficulty. In experiment 1, participants did a visual discrimination, while also performing either the original mind-reading task or our new control task. In experiment 2, we added confidence judgment to measure metacognitive efficiency. We expect to find that even when task difficulty is balanced, metacognitive efficiency will still be lower when combined with the mind-reading task. This would prove that metacognition and mind-reading compete for overlapping cognitive resources. If there is no difference found, this could suggest that previous findings may be due to uneven task demands rather than shared processing. Overall, the project aims to specify how self-reflection and social cognition interact within the human mind.

Comments

Presented at the Fall 2025 Student Scholar Symposium at Chapman University.

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