Retrospective Confidence Judgments: Eye-tracking Measurements To Disentangle Subjective Experience

In our daily life, we rely not only on knowledge but also on our personal subjective experience. One of the ways we assess our personal experience is by evaluating the confidence in our knowledge. For example, if at an exam a professor asks the question: "What year was the Battle of Waterloo?", we immediately will try to deliver a suitable answer by monitoring the confidence we have on its correctness. If we consider that the certainty of our initial answer is low, we might decide to discard that first answer and keep searching for a candidate with a higher chance to be correct . In this research, we used eye-tracking measurements to widen the knowledge we have about how metamemory works. Eye-tracking measures can provide an indication about the mental activity on each moment of task solving. In this study, our main goal was to establish the relationships between the quality of the retrieved information, its subjective experience, and the “window to the brain” that eye-tracker measures provide.