Abstract

Do people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have altered metacognition? Despite the practical and theoretical importance of this question, the evidence is inconsistent. We ran an experiment to test the relationship between visual metacognition and ASD traits in a sample of 360 neurotypical people. We operationalized metacognition as the correspondence between accuracy in a two alternative forced choice task and the participant’s reported confidence. ASD traits were assessed using the Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ). A regression analysis has not shown statistically significant relationships between ASD traits and metacognition nor between ASD traits and confidence. In addition, no relationship was observed between the subscales of the AQ test and metacognition. Our results do not support the hypothesis that ASD traits are associated with metacognition in the general population. However, our study provides methodological and empirical evidence that may be valuable for future research aimed at identifying the relationship between ASD and metacognition.