The ability to monitor one’s own thoughts is termed “metacognition”, whereas the ability to monitor others’ thoughts is termed “mindreading”. The intuitive view of metacognition described above has led some (so-called “two systems” theorists) to claim that distinct psychological mechanisms underpin metacognition and mindreading, and that metacognition is evolutionarily and developmentally prior to mindreading.

This claim is disputed by another group of (“one-system”) theorists who argue that mindreading and metacognition actually rely on exactly the same core psychological mechanism (despite common intuition), and that metacognition actually emerged as a by-product of the evolutionary need to mind-read others. Two-systems theorists use two potentially powerful arguments to support their view. First, they argue that non-human primates are capable of performing well on tests of metacognition even though such primates show little evidence of mindreading ability. Second, they argue that humans with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show intact metacognitive ability despite impaired mindreading.

People

If these arguments are validated, then this would rule out the one-system view of the relation between mindreading and metacognition. However, one-system theorists have challenged these arguments, claiming that (a) the supposedly metacognitive tasks that non-human primates perform well on do not, in fact, require metacognitive awareness, and (b)people with ASD *do* show metacognitive impairments. There is, however, very little empirical research to decide between these arguments and counter-arguments.

Therefore, the aim of our proposed research is to test these theories in a systematic fashion by employing multiple kinds of metacognitive task across two sets of experiments.