Metacognition of average face perception

Abstract

Individuals have the ability to extract summary statistics from multiple items presented simultaneously. However, it is unclear yet whether we have insight into the process of ensemble coding. The aim of this study was to investigate metacognition about average face perception. Participants saw a group of four faces presented for 2s or 5s, and then they were asked to judge whether the following test face was present in the previous set (Experiment 1), or whether the test face was the average of the four member faces (Experiment 2). After each response, participants rated their confidence. Replicating previous findings, there was substantial endorsement for the average face derived from the four member faces in Experiment 1, even though it was not present in the set. When judging faces that had been presented in the set, confidence correlated positively with accuracy, providing evidence for metacognitive awareness of previously studied faces. Importantly, participants were more confident for judgments of the unseen average faces as they became less accurate with their responses, resulting in a negative confidence-accuracy relationship. By contrast, when the average face had to be identified explicitly in Experiment 2, performance was above chance level and there was a positive correlation between confidence and accuracy. These results suggest that people have metacognitive awareness about average face perception when averaging is required explicitly, but they lack insight into the averaging process when member identification is required, and insight into the fine face identification is poor