Beyond "ChatGPT Can Make Mistakes": Designing Interventions to Support Metacognitive Monitoring in AI-Assisted Work

arXiv:2609.17065 · cs.HC, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-15 · Read on arXiv

cs.HC, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-15

Updated: 2026-09-15

Comments: 40 pages, 13 figures, including appendices

Code: https://github.com/ManuelADSantos/MET_AI_Interventions

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

The gist: AI assistance places a metacognitive demand on users, who must judge their own competence and the system's.

Terminology

Abstract

AI assistance places a metacognitive demand on users, who must judge their own competence and the system's. Yet designers lack comparative evidence on which interventions to choose, where to place them, and how to tell whether they worked. We elicited 30 interventions from 11 experts and, with prior work, organized them into a design space of time (when an intervention acts), level (whose competence is judged), and source (who supplies the monitoring cue). A between-subjects experiment (N = 917; 12 planning-and-organizing problems) compared a per-task reliability card, contrasting replies, pause points, and post-problem reflection against a baseline LLM assistant. Reliability cards and contrasting replies reduced estimation error and overconfidence and increased aggregate confidence discrimination. No task-performance improvement or average within-item discrimination gain was established. We contribute a shared vocabulary, a design space, and evidence that measured monitoring and task performance are separable design targets.

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