Investigating people’s metacognitive insight into their own face abilities

Abstract

Within the domain of face processing, researchers have been interested in quantifying the relationship between objective (i.e., performance on laboratory tests of recognition and matching) and subjective measures of ability (typically, self-report questionnaires). Put simply, do people show high levels of metacognitive insight into their own abilities with faces? Although several studies have suggested that the association between these two types of measures may only be moderate, there remain several important issues that require consideration before this question can be sensibly investigated. First, specificity is needed regarding both objective and subjective measurements because both tend to span a wide range of potentially separable abilities. Second, experimental tasks appear to focus on different contexts to those tapped in self-report questionnaire items. Third, recent issues with statistical approaches and visualisation can result in numerical artefacts and misinterpretations. Finally, the sizes of population-level insights suggested by recent work provide only limited information regarding individuals within these populations, and so researchers aiming to identify people at the extremes of ability must be careful when drawing conclusions. Taken together, we argue that more attention to these issues is needed when attempting to investigate metacognitive insight within this domain.