The Metacognitive Probe: Five Behavioural Calibration Diagnostics for LLMs
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 wheth...
| Authors | Rafael C. T. Oliveira |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 11 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 May 2026 |
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