Effects of Handgrip Effort on Perceptual Judgments and Metacognitive Performance in Older Adults
PsyArXiv preprint (2026). 10.31234/osf.io/wjerv_v1
Here we examined how physical-effort induced arousal may have a differential impact on perception and metacognition in older adults. While arousal has been shown to enhance some aspects of perceptual performance in young adults, it can also disrupt metacognitive performance. However, both perceptual and metacognitive functions decline with age, alongside deterioration of neural systems that regulate arousal (e.g., Locus Coeruleus-Norepinephrine; LC-NE). Thus, it is unclear how physical-effort induced arousal influences perceptual performance and metacognitive efficiency in older adults. To test this, we had participants complete two perceptual discrimination tasks (auditory and visual), which involved judging whether two sequential stimuli were the same or different, and subsequently rating their confidence in their same/different response. At the start of each trial, arousal was manipulated by instructing participants to maintain either a low or high hand grip force on a dynamometer. We fit psychometric functions to characterize perceptual performance between grip levels and used the Relative Psychometric Function (RPF) analysis framework to characterize metacognitive ability while controlling for perceptual performance. Across tasks, high grip increased psychometric thresholds, but not psychometric slopes. On the other hand, metacognitive efficiency increased under high grip and was numerically larger in the auditory task, which appeared to be driven by increased error awareness during the easiest stimulus level. Together, these findings suggest that acute arousal can disrupt perceptual performance but enhance metacognitive efficiency in older adults.
Sun, A. Y., Dastgheib, M., Hu, X., Bennett, I. J., Zhang, W., Maniscalco, B., Peters, M. A. K., & Seitz, A. (2026, October 20). Effects of Handgrip Effort on Perceptual Judgments and Metacognitive Performance in Older Adults. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/wjerv_v1