Metacognition is the ability to monitor one’s own cognitive processing, behavioural performance and conscious decisions. Earlier evidence suggested that individual experience in a particular operational domain (e.g. spatial visual attention, memory) can lead to improvements in metacognitive monitoring in this domain: while making a decision in a particular task, people can better estimate the likelihood of making an error, and, for example, they assign lower confidence rating to those decisions when they are more likely to make a mistake. In other words, people can better evaluate available evidence they can use for decision, and their own ability to give correct answer based on this evidence. However, we did not have evidence to what extent this effect extends beyond low-level perceptual tasks and memory to high-level cognitive performance (e.g. in language processing, calculus, etc.) Moreover, it is hotly debated whether metacognitive enhancement in one domain can be transferred to a different domain, or whether metacognitive skills are specific to the domain in which they are forged. In this project, we addressed the question whether enhanced individual experience with language processing, honed by bilingualism, leads to enhanced metacognitive skills in language domain, and if so, whether this enhancement can be transferred to non-language domains (in other words, whether bilinguals, when compared to monolinguals, can better estimate the probability of giving a correct answer or making an error when they are doing a language task; and if so, whether bilinguals’ metacognitive enhancement can also be observed in non-language domain.
