Tutku Öztel^1,2 (), Martin Wiener¹, Fuat Balci^2,3; ¹George Mason University, ²Koc University, ³University of Manitoba

Previous studies have demonstrated that human participants can keep track of the magnitude and direction of their trial-to-trial errors in temporal, spatial, and numerical estimates, referred to as “metric error monitoring”. Notably, these prior studies investigated metric error monitoring in an explicit timing/counting context, in which subjects were instructed to attend to the metric of interest. However, error monitoring also requires implicit monitoring of the magnitude and direction of temporal mismatches between the experience of different stimuli, in which temporal information is not explicitly estimated or reproduced. To address this, in three experiments we investigated whether participants (n=25-39; 3 experiments) could monitor errors in a visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, where they judged which of the two consecutive stimuli appeared first while fixating on a central fixation cross during head fixation (~35cm distance). In an initial and replication experiment, stimuli appeared on the horizontal axis (left/right), whereas in Experiment 3 they were on the vertical axis (top/bottom), in order to test for the potential influence of stimulus alignment. Participants also reported their confidence regarding the accuracy of their TOJ on a trial-by-trial basis on a 1-3 scale. The results of all three experiments showed that the confidence judgments for correct responses increased and for incorrect responses decreased with longer absolute, compared to relative, point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) centered- stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA; where PSS-centered SOA = SOA - PSS). A more granular analysis showed that participants could only correctly monitor their errors for left-first (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2) / bottom-first (Experiment 3) presentation orders, suggesting a metacognitive spatial–temporal association of response codes (STEARC) effect. Overall, the observed results provide evidence for metacognitive awareness of implicit metric errors, which can be explained by the linguistic asymmetries between spatial and temporal descriptions, as asserted by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).