Hydrocortisone decreases metacognitive efficiency independent of perceived stress

Investigating the Effects of Discrimination Experiences on Everyday Metamemory Accuracy

OBJECTIVES

Lifetime and daily experiences of discrimination contribute to impaired performance on cognitive assessments. However, the underlying mechanism by which discrimination negatively affects cognition is unclear. Recent research investigating stress-induced impairment of metamemory may address the relationship between discrimination experiences and cognitive impairment.

METHODS

The aim of this study was to determine the relationship of lifetime and daily experiences of discrimination, daily affect balance, baseline objective cognitive performance, and sociodemographic variables (age, race, ethnicity, and sex) with metamemory accuracy across the lifespan (ages 20-75). Impaired metamemory accuracy was defined by the number of subjective cognitive complaints. Diary data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS Refresher 1) Daily Diary Project (N = 782) was used for these analyses.

RESULTS

Results from linear mixed model analyses showed significant within-person effects of daily discrimination, where people who reported more daily discrimination also reported lower metamemory accuracy, and daily affect balance, where people who reported very negative affect also reported lower metamemory accuracy. Additionally, linear mixed model analyses revealed significant between-person effects of race on metamemory accuracy, with individuals from minoritized racial groups generally reporting poorer metamemory accuracy. Daily discrimination experiences also interacted with other variables in predicting day-to-day metamemory accuracy.

DISCUSSION

These findings add to our understanding of how psychosocial stress in the form of daily discrimination experiences may impair metamemory processes contributing to increased subjective cognitive complaints. Future research should consider the contribution of daily experiences of discrimination across the lifespan to poor cognitive outcomes in later life.

Hot metacognition: poorer metacognitive efficiency following acute but not traumatic stress

Aberrations to metacognition-the ability to reflect on and evaluate self-performance-are a feature of poor mental health. Theoretical models of post-traumatic stress disorder propose that following severe stress or trauma, maladaptive metacognitive evaluations and appraisals of the event drive the development of symptoms. Empirical research is required in order to reveal whether disruptions to metacognition cause or contribute to symptom development in line with theoretical accounts, or are simply a consequence of ongoing psychopathology. In two experiments, using hierarchical Bayesian modelling of metacognition measured in a memory recognition task, we assessed whether distortions to metacognition occur at a state-level after an acute stress induction, and/or at a trait-level in a sample of individuals experiencing intrusive memories following traumatic stress. Results from experiment 1, an in-person laboratory-based experiment, demonstrated that heightened psychological responses to the stress induction were associated with poorer metacognitive efficiency, despite there being no overall change in metacognitive efficiency from pre- to post-stress (N = 27). Conversely, in experiment 2, an online experiment using the same metamemory task, we did not find evidence of metacognitive alterations in a transdiagnostic sample of patients with intrusive memory symptomatology following traumatic stress (N = 36, compared to 44 matched controls). Our results indicate a relationship between state-level psychological responses to stress and metacognitive alterations. The lack of evidence for pre- to post-stress differences in metamemory illustrates the importance for future studies to reveal the direction of this relationship, and consequently the duration of stress-associated metacognitive impairments and their impact on mental health.

Decision Making in Moral Judgment Context is Modulated by Individual Metacognition

Metacognition refers to the human capacity to access and monitor one's own mental states. Recent research suggests that this capacity expands to the social world, e.g., when individuals explicitly share their cognitive processes with others. Additionally, metacognition is also linked to cognitive flexibility, and the latter to ideologically radical behaviors. Indeed, the absence of control over one's own mental activity could be at the base of different phenomena linked to social cognition. We investigate the metacognitive capacity of individuals in relation to the radicality with which they make a moral choice (utilitarian vs. deontological). For this purpose, 76 participants were submitted to 24 hypothetical situations, with the aim of evaluating the consistency (i.e., the radicality) of their moral choices. Then, in an independent experimental session, we evaluated the participants' metacognitive efficiency. We managed to demonstrate that individual metacognition scores are correlated with the radicality of a moral choice. We discussed the impact and relevance of metacognition in ecological contexts, particularly where subjective evaluation of the environment involves individual choices with social consequences.

Insights into the molecular genetic basis of individual differences in metacognition

There is a striking lack of studies on the molecular genetic basis of metacognition, i.e., the higher-order ability to monitor mental processes. Here, an initial step toward resolving this issue was undertaken by investigating functional polymorphisms from three genes of the dopaminergic or serotonergic systems (DRD4, COMT, and 5-HTTLPR) in relation to behaviorally assessed metacognition in six paradigms across three cognitive domains. We report evidence for a task-dependent higher average confidence level (metacognitive bias) in carriers of at least one S or L_G-allele in the 5-HTTLPR genotype and integrate these findings within a differential susceptibility framework.

Consensus Goals in the Field of Visual Metacognition

Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term common goals. We describe the process that we followed, the goals themselves, and our plans for accomplishing these goals. If this effort proves successful within the next few years, such consensus building around common goals could be adopted more widely in psychological science.

Students With High Metacognition Are Favourable Towards Individualism When Anxious

Metacognitive ability has been described as an important predictor of several processes involved in learning, including problem-solving. Although this relationship is fairly documented, little is known about the mechanisms that could modulate it. Given its relationship with both constructs, we decided to evaluate the impact of self-knowledge on PS. In addition, we inspected whether emotional (self-reported anxiety) and interpersonal (attitudes towards social interdependence) variables could affect the relationship between metacognition and problem-solving. We tested a sample of 32 undergraduate students and used behavioural tasks and self-report questionnaires. Contrary to the literature, we found no significant relationship between metacognition and problem-solving performance, nor a significant moderating effect when including emotional and interpersonal variables in the model. In contrast, we observed a significant moderating model combining metacognition, self-reported anxiety and attitudes towards social interdependence. It was found that participants with high metacognition reported attitudes unfavourable towards interdependence when they felt high anxiety. These results suggest that already anxious individuals with high metacognition would prefer to work alone rather than with others, as a coping mechanism against further anxiety derived from cooperation. We hypothesise that in anxiogenic contexts, metacognition is used as a tool to compare possible threats with one's own skills and act accordingly, in order to maximise one's own performance. Further studies are needed to understand how metacognition works in contexts adverse to learning.

Measuring metacognitive performance: type 1 performance dependence and test-retest reliability

Research on metacognition-thinking about thinking-has grown rapidly and fostered our understanding of human cognition in healthy individuals and clinical populations. Of central importance is the concept of metacognitive performance, which characterizes the capacity of an individual to estimate and report the accuracy of primary (type 1) cognitive processes or actions ensuing from these processes. Arguably one of the biggest challenges for measures of metacognitive performance is their dependency on objective type 1 performance, although more recent methods aim to address this issue. The present work scrutinizes the most popular metacognitive performance measures in terms of two critical characteristics: independence of type 1 performance and test-retest reliability. Analyses of data from the Confidence Database (total N = 6912) indicate that no current metacognitive performance measure is independent of type 1 performance. The shape of this dependency is largely reproduced by extending current models of metacognition with a source of metacognitive noise. Moreover, the reliability of metacognitive performance measures is highly sensitive to the combination of type 1 performance and trial number. Importantly, trial numbers frequently employed in metacognition research are too low to achieve an acceptable level of test-retest reliability. Among common task characteristics, simultaneous choice and confidence reports most strongly improved reliability. Finally, general recommendations about design choices and analytical remedies for studies investigating metacognitive performance are provided.

Dichotic listening performance and interhemispheric integration after administration of hydrocortisone

Chronic stress has been shown to have long-term effects on functional hemispheric asymmetries in both humans and non-human species. The short-term effects of acute stress exposure on functional hemispheric asymmetries are less well investigated. It has been suggested that acute stress can affect functional hemispheric asymmetries by modulating inhibitory function of the corpus callosum, the white matter pathway that connects the two hemispheres. On the molecular level, this modulation may be caused by a stress-related increase in cortisol, a major stress hormone. Therefore, it was the aim of the present study to investigate the acute effects of cortisol on functional hemispheric asymmetries. Overall, 60 participants were tested after administration of 20 mg hydrocortisone or a placebo tablet in a cross-over design. Both times, a verbal and an emotional dichotic listening task to assess language and emotional lateralization, as well as a Banich-Belger task to assess interhemispheric integration were applied. Lateralization quotients were determined for both reaction times and correctly identified syllables in both dichotic listening tasks. In the Banich-Belger task, across-field advantages were determined to quantify interhemispheric integration. While we could replicate previously reported findings for these tasks in the placebo session, we could not detect any differences in asymmetry between hydrocortisone and placebo treatment. This partially corroborates the results of a previous study we performed using social stress to induce cortisol increases. This suggests that an increase in cortisol does not influence dichotic listening performance on a behavioral level. As other studies reported an effect of stress hormones on functional hemispheric asymmetries on a neuro-functional level, future research using neuronal imaging methods would be helpful in the characterization of the relation of hemispheric asymmetries and stress hormones.

Increase in Beta Power Reflects Attentional Top-Down Modulation After Psychosocial Stress Induction

Selective attention depends on goal-directed and stimulus-driven modulatory factors, each relayed by different brain rhythms. Under certain circumstances, stress-related states can change the balance between goal-directed and stimulus-driven factors. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear. In this study, we explored how psychosocial stress can modulate brain rhythms during an attentional task and a task-free period. We recorded the EEG and ECG activity of 42 healthy participants subjected to either the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), a controlled procedure to induce stress, or a comparable control protocol (same physical and cognitive effort but without the stress component), flanked by an attentional task, a 90 s of task-free period and a state of anxiety questionnaire. We observed that psychosocial stress induced an increase in heart rate (HR), self-reported anxiety, and alpha power synchronization. Also, psychosocial stress evoked a relative beta power increase during correct trials of the attentional task, which correlates positively with anxiety and heart rate increase, and inversely with attentional accuracy. These results suggest that psychosocial stress affects performance by redirecting attentional resources toward internal threat-related thoughts. An increment of endogenous top-down modulation reflected an increased beta-band activity that may serve as a compensatory mechanism to redirect attentional resources toward the ongoing task. The data obtained here may contribute to designing new ways of clinical management of the human stress response in the future and could help to minimize the damaging effects of persistent stressful experiences.