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- Title
The Metronome Counting Task for measuring meta-awareness.
- Authors
Anderson, Thomas; Farb, Norman A. S.
- Abstract
How can we measure the absence of awareness? Attention research has developed tools for measuring self-caught meta-awareness restoration and behavioral mind-wandering, but we lack a way to dynamically track the loss of meta-awareness. The present pre-registered study sought to bring together three extant paradigms into one tool designed to dynamically measure meta-awareness: the Metronome Counting Task (MCT). The MCT is a continuous performance task wherein participants tap along to a steady beat while counting to 20, indicating the final count by a special button press. This sample (N = 74) provides evidence that participants could self-catch their failures in the task, that a response variability metric measuring mind-wandering depth was successfully recreated in this new tool, and that dynamic performance changes may be useful for detecting meta-awareness loss before participants become internally aware of the loss or are caught by external errors. The MCT was conceived as a tool that will support neuroimaging models of dynamic fluctuations during sustained attention, providing a link between the phenomenology of meta-awareness, the behavior measured by a replicable index of task engagement, and a continuous performance task on time-scales relevant for MRI. We discuss the possibility that meta-awareness may exist on a continuum and that conceptions of mind-wandering as attention failures may plausibly be reconceived as changes in goal priority manifesting as shifting task engagement.
- Subjects
MIND-wandering; AWARENESS; MAGNETIC resonance imaging; METRONOME; TASK performance; MEASURING instruments
- Publication
Behavior Research Methods, 2020, Vol 52, Issue 6, p2646
- ISSN
1554-351X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3758/s13428-020-01418-z