Toward a Metacognitive Account of Cognitive Offloading

Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive science 2016-07, Vol.40 (5), p.1080-1127
Main Authors: Dunn, Timothy L., Risko, Evan F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beliefs
Cognition
Cognitive offloading
Decision Making
Difficulty Level
Distributed cognition
Embedded cognition
Evaluation Methods
Expectation
Female
Humans
Learning Strategies
Male
Metacognition
Models, Psychological
Psychological Theory
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Reaction Time - physiology
Strategy selection
Word Order
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Summary:Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by independently manipulating the costs associated with both word rotation and array frame rotation. Surprisingly, we found that individuals’ patterns of spontaneous physical rotations did not follow patterns of performance costs or benefits associated with being physically rotated, findings difficult to reconcile with existing theories of strategy selection involving external resources. Individuals’ subjective ratings of perceived benefits, rather, provided an excellent match to the patterns of physical rotations, suggesting that the critical variable when deciding on‐the‐fly whether to incorporate an external resource is the participant's metacognitive beliefs regarding expected performance or the effort required for each approach (i.e., internal vs. internal + external). Implications for metacognition's future in theories of cognitive offloading are discussed.
ISSN:0364-0213
1551-6709
DOI:10.1111/cogs.12273