The role of visual feedback in metacognitive judgments of motor performance

Predicting the outcome of one's actions is crucial for effective behaviour, yet the mechanical underpinnings of this metacognitive ability remain poorly understood. We investigated the impact of visual feedback on basketball players' ability to monitor the accuracy of their free throws. In two preregistered experiments (N = 39 & N = 21), basketball players performed a free-throw basketball task while a visual occlusion was triggered either immediately after the ball left their hands or after 200, 400, 600, or 800 ms. Participants then predicted whether the ball was in the hoop and reported their confidence in their answer. In both experiments, we found that the amount of visual feedback co-varied positively with the capacity to adjust confidence to predictions following successful, but not failed, throws. This shows that during sport self-evaluation, people rely on outcome-related visual cues primarily when assessing success, whereas failure may be judged based on internal signals. Moreover, to investigate metacognitive architecture, we compared local and global, and prospective and retrospective, judgments, observing that the metacognitive bias differed as a function of the judgments. This suggests that different cues are used for the different metacognitive judgments.