Exploring the influence of strategy choice involving cognitive offloading on metacognitive judgments

The learning strategies available to learners can play a critical role in their learning processes. To date, the influence from metacognitive control to metacognitive monitoring remains unknown. Motivated by this, the current study explored the effect of strategy choice involving the cognitive offloading option within two-layer metacognitive judgments. By reanalyzing a previously collected dataset using the paired-associate paradigm, we observed that first-order and second-order metacognitive judgments (FOJs and SOJs) and their joint profile was sensitive to the availability of strategy choices, regardless of whether cognitive offloading was employed. Furthermore, we found that recall performance tended to be higher when participants offloaded and lower when cognitive offloading was available but not employed, compared with when it was unavailable. We interpret that employing cognitive offloading was associated with higher FOJs and SOJs that track improvements in recall. These findings generate new, testable hypotheses about a potential pathway of effects from control to monitoring processes, with implications for layered metacognition.