The Metacognitive Probe: Five Behavioural Calibration Diagnostics for LLMs

Rafael C. T. Oliveira · May 11, 2026 · Citations: 0

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What to verify

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Evidence quality

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Derived from abstract and metadata only.

Abstract

The Metacognitive Probe is an exploratory five-task, 15-slot diagnostic that decomposes an LLM's confidence behaviour into five behaviourally-distinct dimensions: confidence calibration (T1-CC), epistemic vigilance (T2-EV), knowledge boundary (T3-KB), calibration range (T4-CR), and reasoning-chain validation (T5-RCV). It is evaluated on N=8 frontier models and N=69 humans. The instrument is motivated by Flavell (1979) and Nelson and Narens (1990) but operates on observable confidence-correctness alignment; it is not a validated cross-species metacognition scale, and the pre-specified human developmental hypothesis was falsified. Composite benchmarks (MMLU, BIG-Bench, HELM, GPQA) ask whether a model produces a correct response. They are silent on whether the model knows when its response is wrong. A model can score 80 on a composite calibration benchmark and still be wildly overconfident in narrow pockets the aggregate cannot surface. The Metacognitive Probe surfaces those pockets. Our headline is a 47-point within-model dissociation in Gemini 2.5 Flash: panel-best within-task calibration (T1-CC = 88; Spearman rho = +0.551, 95% CI [+0.14, +0.80], p = 0.005) and panel-worst cross-task difficulty prediction (T4-CR = 41; sigma_conf = 1.4 across twelve factoids).

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Human Feedback Signal

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Evaluation Signal

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What We Could Verify

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Human Feedback Types

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"The Metacognitive Probe is an exploratory five-task, 15-slot diagnostic that decomposes an LLM's confidence behaviour into five behaviourally-distinct dimensions: confidence calibration (T1-CC), epistemic vigilance (T2-EV), knowledge boundary (T3-KB), calibration range (T4-CR), and reasoning-chain validation (T5-RCV)."

Evaluation Modes

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Quality Controls

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Benchmarks / Datasets

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MMLU

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"Composite benchmarks (MMLU, BIG-Bench, HELM, GPQA) ask whether a model produces a correct response."

Reported Metrics

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Calibration

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Rater Population

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Human Feedback Details

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Potential human-data signal: No explicit human-data keywords detected.
Potential benchmark anchors: MMLU
Abstract highlights: 3 key sentence(s) extracted below.

Evaluation Details

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Potential metric signals: Calibration
Confidence: Provisional (metadata-only fallback).

Research Brief

Metadata summary

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Key Takeaways

The Metacognitive Probe is an exploratory five-task, 15-slot diagnostic that decomposes an LLM's confidence behaviour into five behaviourally-distinct dimensions: confidence calibration (T1-CC), epistemic vigilance (T2-EV), knowledge boundary (T3-KB), calibration range (T4-CR), and reasoning-chain validation (T5-RCV).
It is evaluated on N=8 frontier models and N=69 humans.
The instrument is motivated by Flavell (1979) and Nelson and Narens (1990) but operates on observable confidence-correctness alignment; it is not a validated cross-species metacognition scale, and the pre-specified human developmental hypothesis was falsified.

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