Metacognitive training facilitates optimal cognitive offloading

Cognitive offloading refers to the use of physical action and the externalenvironment to reduce cognitive demand. Offloading strategies such as creatingexternal reminders instead of relying on internal memory are highly effective andplay a key role in supporting real-world cognition. Previous work has shown thatpeople have systematic biases in their offloading strategies, which are related tobiased metacognitive evaluations of cognitive ability. These metacognitive biasescould potentially be mitigated by metacognitive interventions. However researchinvestigating the effect of metacognitive interventions has produced mixed results.Here, we investigated the influence of a brief intervention comprising just five trialsof metacognitive feedback during an initial practice session. After this interventionparticipants performed a memory task where they decided between using internalmemory (for maximum reward) or external reminders (for reduced reward),allowing us to determine the optimality of offloading strategies. The key differencefrom earlier work was that task performance determined financial reward, toincentivise optimal offloading. As predicted, metacognitive training reducedmetacognitive bias and also led to more optimal offloading strategies. Therefore,metacognitive feedback is an effective intervention to improve the optimality ofcognitive offloading, which could improve the adaptive use of cognitive tools.