Checking behavior is a natural and adaptive strategy for resolving uncertainty in everyday situations. Here, we aimed at investigating the psychological drivers of checking and its regulation by uncertainty, in non-clinical participants and controlled experimental settings. We found that the sensitivity of participants’ explicit confidence judgments to actual performance (explicit metacognition) predicted the extent to which their checking strategy was regulated by uncertainty. Yet, a more implicit measure of metacognition (derived from asking participants to opt between trials) did not contribute to the regulation of checking behavior. Meanwhile, how participants scaled on questionnaires eliciting self-beliefs such as self-confidence and self-reported obsessive–compulsive symptoms also predicted participants’ uncertainty-guided checking tendencies. Altogether, these findings demonstrate that checking behavior is likely the outcome of a core explicit metacognitive process operating at the scale of single decisions, while remaining influenced by general self-beliefs. Our findings are thus consistent with two mechanisms (micro vs. macro) through which this otherwise adaptive behavior could go awry in certain psychiatric disorders such as obsessive–compulsive disorder.

检查行为是解决日常情况中不确定性的自然和适应性策略。在这里，我们的目的是在非临床参与者和受控实验环境中调查检查的心理驱动因素及其不确定性的调节。我们发现参与者的外显信心判断对实际表现（外显元认知）的敏感性预测了他们的检查策略受不确定性调节的程度。然而，更隐含的元认知测量（来自要求参与者在试验之间进行选择）对检查行为的调节没有帮助。同时，参与者如何根据引发自信等自信和自我报告的强迫症症状的问卷进行缩放也预测了参与者的不确定性引导的检查倾向。总而言之，这些发现表明，检查行为可能是在单个决策范围内运行的核心显式元认知过程的结果，同时仍然受到一般自信的影响。因此，我们的研究结果与两种机制（微观与宏观）一致，通过这两种机制，这种原本适应性的行为可能会在某些精神疾病（例如强迫症）中出错。