Taylor Gepes-Carroll¹, Martin Weiner¹, Tutku Öztel¹; ¹George Mason University

Error monitoring involves the ability to keep track of one’s own errors without receiving external feedback. Recent studies demonstrated that this ability holistically captures metric errors, including temporal, spatial, and numerosity domains, abiding by A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM; Walsh, 2003). Previous findings demonstrated that increased WM load in a dual-task paradigm, where the secondary task involved mental alphabetization, impaired error monitoring in a perceptual decision-making task (Maniscalco & Lau, 2015). However, this effect did not extend to temporal error monitoring (TEM), which highlights the mechanistic differences associated with these two metacognitive processes (Öztel & Balci, 2023). This discrepancy may be due to domain-specific WM load effects, where the mental alphabetization task may not have engaged the metric characteristics required for a diminishment in TEM. We investigated this possibility in two separate dual-task experiments. In both experiments, participants (N=44) performed temporal reproduction (2500 milliseconds) as the primary task, where they evaluated their own performance in terms of magnitude (via confidence ratings) and error directionality (via short-long judgments) relative to a target duration on a trial-by-trial basis. Depending on the experiment, the secondary task involved alphabetizing a letter sequence (Experiment 1- direct replication of Öztel & Balci, 2023) or calculating numerical equations (Experiment 2- original experiment). We investigated TEM abilities separately for magnitude and error directionality under three WM load indices, including WM difficulty, number of letters/arithmetic operations, and WM accuracy. In both experiments, mean confidence was higher for easy WM trials. Furthermore, larger letter sequences were associated with increased “long” responses for error directionality judgments in Experiment 1. However, both experiments demonstrated intact TEM abilities for magnitude and directionality monitoring across the levels of all WM indices. Together, these results indicate that the sensitivity of TEM is robust to WM load, regardless of the metric characteristics associated with WM load.