Temporal Error Monitoring in Temporal Order Judgements: Support for a Metacognitive STEARC Effect
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous studies have demonstrated that human participants can keep track of the magnitude and direction of their trial-to-trial errors in temporal, spatial, and numerical estimates, referred to as “metric error monitoring”. Notably, these prior studies investigated metric error monitoring in an explicit timing/counting context, in which subjects were instructed to attend to the metric of interest. However, error monitoring also requires implicit monitoring of the magnitude and direction of temporal mismatches between the experience of different stimuli, in which temporal information is not explicitly estimated or reproduced. To address this, in three experiments we investigated whether participants (n=25-39; 3 experiments) could monitor errors in a visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, where they judged which of the two consecutive stimuli appeared first while fixating on a central fixation cross during head fixation (~35cm distance). In an initial and replication experiment, stimuli appeared on the horizontal axis (left/right), whereas in Experiment 3 they were on the vertical axis (top/bottom), in order to test for the potential influence of stimulus alignment. Participants also reported their confidence regarding the accuracy of their TOJ on a trial-by-trial basis on a 1-3 scale. The results of all three experiments showed that the confidence judgments for correct responses increased and for incorrect responses decreased with longer absolute, compared to relative, point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) centered- stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA; where PSS-centered SOA = SOA - PSS). A more granular analysis showed that participants could only correctly monitor their errors for left-first (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2) / bottom-first (Experiment 3) presentation orders, suggesting a metacognitive spatial–temporal association of response codes (STEARC) effect. Overall, the observed results provide evidence for metacognitive awareness of implicit metric errors, which can be explained by the linguistic asymmetries between spatial and temporal descriptions, as asserted by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it