Metacognition for hearing in noise: a comparison between younger and older adults

ABSTRACT

Metacognition entails knowledge of one’s own cognitive skills, perceived self-efficacy and locus of control when performing a task, and performance monitoring. Age-related changes in metacognition have been observed in metamemory, whereas their occurrence for hearing remained unknown. We tested 30 older and 30 younger adults with typical hearing, to assess if age reduces metacognition for hearing sentences in noise. Metacognitive monitoring for older and younger adults was overall comparable. In fact, the older group achieved better monitoring for words in the second part of the phrase. Additionally, only older adults showed a correlation between performance and perceived confidence. No age differentiation was found for locus of control, knowledge or self-efficacy. This suggests intact metacognitive skills for hearing in noise in older adults, alongside a somewhat paradoxical overconfidence in younger adults. These findings support exploiting metacognition for older adults dealing with noisy environments, since metacognition is central for implementing self-regulation strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Metacognition
• aging
• hearing in noise
• metacognitive monitoring
• self-efficacy

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Velux Stiftung under Grant 1439. We thank Matilde Pavani for her drawing in Figure 2, Mirko Tommasini for his help in recording the stimuli and Alisia Riccitelli for her help in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The dataset and a sample of participants’ view in VR can be found in OSF online repositories at https://osf.io/atcv9/

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Velux Stiftung [1439].