Strategic use of reminders: Influence of both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive confidence, independent of objective memory ability

How do we decide whether to use external artifacts and reminders to remember delayed intentions, versus relying on unaided memory? Experiment 1 (N = 400) showed that participants’ choice to forgo reminders in an experimental task was independently predicted by subjective confidence and objective ability, even when the two measures were themselves uncorrelated. Use of reminders improved performance, explaining significant variance in intention fulfilment even after controlling for unaided ability. Experiment 2 (N = 303) additionally investigated a pair of unrelated perceptual discrimination tasks, where the confidence and sensitivity of metacognitive judgments was decorrelated from objective performance using a staircase procedure. Participants with lower confidence in their perceptual judgments set more reminders in the delayed-intention task, even though confidence was unrelated to objective accuracy. However, memory confidence was a better predictor of reminder setting. Thus, propensity to set reminders was independently influenced by (a) domain-general metacognitive confidence; (b) task-specific confidence; and (c) objective ability.