Prospective and retrospective awareness of moment-to-moment fluctuations in visual working memory performance.

= 85), we demonstrate that retrospective awareness is more sensitive to VWM performance fluctuations than prospective awareness in young adults, though both metacognitive abilities are imperfect. Poor metacognitive abilities reflected a general tendency-particularly among low VWM capacity individuals-to overestimate upcoming VWM performance. When individuals overestimated their upcoming VWM performance (i.e., prospective failures), VWM performance significantly reduced compared to the preceding trials of a prospective failure. Moreover, this reduction in performance significantly lingered into subsequent trials. However, individuals' prospective and retrospective awareness better aligned to VWM performance after a prospective failure. This postfailure calibration occurred even without feedback signaling a prospective failure (Experiment 2), suggesting a metacognitive efficiency in recognizing the initial overestimation. Taken together, our results suggest that individuals, particularly low-capacity individuals, have a limited awareness toward upcoming VWM performance but exhibit metacognitive adjustments immediately following a prospective failure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).