Large Language Models lack essential metacognition for reliable medical reasoning

Large Language Models have demonstrated expert-level accuracy on medical board examinations, suggesting potential for clinical decision support systems. However, their metacognitive abilities, crucial for medical decision-making, remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we developed MetaMedQA, a benchmark incorporating confidence scores and metacognitive tasks into multiple-choice medical questions. We evaluated twelve models on dimensions including confidence-based accuracy, missing answer recall, and unknown recall. Despite high accuracy on multiple-choice questions, our study revealed significant metacognitive deficiencies across all tested models. Models consistently failed to recognize their knowledge limitations and provided confident answers even when correct options were absent. In this work, we show that current models exhibit a critical disconnect between perceived and actual capabilities in medical reasoning, posing significant risks in clinical settings. Our findings emphasize the need for more robust evaluation frameworks that incorporate metacognitive abilities, essential for developing reliable Large Language Model enhanced clinical decision support systems.