How to Cite
Fiedler, Klaus, Ackerman, Rakefet and Scarampi, Chiara: Metacognition: Monitoring and Controlling One’s Own Knowledge, Reasoning and Decisions, in Sternberg, Robert J. and Funke, Joachim (Eds.): The Psychology of Human Thought: An Introduction, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2019, p. 89–111. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.470.c6669
License (Chapter)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Identifiers (Book)
ISBN 978-3-947732-33-3 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-947732-34-0 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-3-947732-35-7 (Hardcover)
Published
07/31/2019
Metacognition: Monitoring and Controlling One’s Own Knowledge, Reasoning and Decisions
- The term “metacognition” refers to the subset of cognitive operations that are involved in the critical assessment and quality control of one’s own cognitive functions. It is useful to distinguish between monitoring and control as the two major metacognitive functions. Rather than being separate from cognition, metacognition is integral to every cognitive performance, from brief perceptual tasks to complex reasoning challenges.
- Guiding people to effective regulation of effort is the "holy grail", or ultimate goal, of metacognitive research.
- Crucial to understanding sources for monitoring biases is measurement of resolution, the ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect answers, and calibration, the extent to which judgments tend to be overconfident or underconfident.
- Retrospective, post-decision confidence ratings were found to be more accurate than prospective ratings provided beforehand.
- Metacognitive judgments (e.g., of confidence) utilize distinct heuristic cues, such as fluency, familiarity, accessibility, and pronounceability.
- Although the neuropsychological underpinnings of metacognition are complicated, convergent evidence indicates that rostral and dorsal parts of the lateral PFC are important for the accuracy of retrospective performance judgments, whereas prospective judgments of performance seem to depend on the medial PFC.
- Metacognitive myopia—the uncritical and naïve tendency to rely on invalid samples of information—constitutes a serious impediment of rational behavior.
