L7 - What is Metacognition?

Question 1

What is meta-cognition?

Answer 1

Awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes

Question 2

Do we have access to our own cognitions according to psychological literature?

Answer 2

Yes

Question 3

beliefs about how you learn, remember, best achieve an outcome that you will use to modify your behaviour are examples of…

Answer 3

meta-cognition

Question 4

Beliefs about processes involved in monitoring and controlling performance on a task is…

Answer 4

Metacognition

Question 5

How much people remember.

How people remember.

Which one of these is meta-cognition?

Answer 5

How people remember.

Question 6

What are 3 reasons why it is important to study metacognition instead of only studying traditional experimental memory paradigms?

Answer 6

1. Traditional experimental memory paradigms don’t capture this aspect of cognition

(they control it, only allow performance on a carefully controlled paradigm)

2. Traditional memory paradigms don’t reflect the operation of memory in real world environments

(e.g. eye witnesses aren’t told a list of colours of a car or lists of things they try to remember, its often free recall and not like list-recall. Does ‘tell the truth’ mean tell only what you remember 100% or tell whatever it is you think you recall)

3. What we learn could be used to improve many decisions based on information accessed from memory.

(if we can teach people the best way to access their memory or set up an environment where they can get more control we can get better and more accurate memory)

Question 7

What is the meta-cognitivist criticism of the classic memory paradigms (list-learning memory tests etc.)

Answer 7

That they don’t reflect how memory recall works in the real world.

Question 8

What are the two different levels of cognitive operations?

Answer 8

Meta-level and Object-level

Question 9

What are the two processes which are used for the meta-level and object-level to interact?

Answer 9

Monitoring and Control

Question 10

What is monitoring in reference to the interaction of the levels of cognitive operations?

Answer 10

The access and information that you get when trying to remember something

• When we are monitoring we are monitoring our cognitive operations and getting this subjective experience or feeling.*
• (Subjective feeling of effort of trying to infer information and whether it is in there)*

Question 11

What is control in reference to the interaction of the levels of cognitive operations?

Answer 11

​The Behaviour

Whether we act on the information that you have obtained via the monitoring process

Subjective experience from monitoring determines current and future cognitive operations

Question 12

When monitoring do you only report information if you get an exact answer?

Answer 12

No, many times it comes as a range

(e.g. I believe it was between 3 and 7)

Question 13

What does the monitoring process in cognitive operation allow us to do?

Answer 13

Observe and reflect on our own cognition

Question 14

How is the monitoring process in cognitive operation measured?

Answer 14

By asking people to report their own monitoring

It’s all subjective, but this is ok because that is exactly what we are after in meta-cognition

Question 15

What are the 4 measures of monitoring?

Answer 15

Ease of Learning

Judgement of Learning

Feeling of Knowing

Confidence

Question 16

How do we measure control?

Answer 16

By analysing behaviour

Question 17

Conscious and non-conscious decisions we make based on the output of our monitoring processes is a definition of

Answer 17

Control process in meta-cognition

Question 18

What are the 5 measures of the control process in cognition?

Answer 18

Question 19

If you were studying for an exam and you had to decide whether you had learnt enough.

What might you measure in terms of monitoring and control to determine what your beliefs were?

Answer 19

Monitoring: Subjective judgement for how much you had learnt

Control: Amount of time studying for each time

Question 20

What were the two significant experiments which determined whether monitoring worked in 1965 and 1966?

Answer 20

Hart (1965): Feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgements predict performance on recognition test.

Underwood (1966): Ease-of-learning (EOL) judgements predicted recall perforamance.

Question 21

Explain what the Hart (1965) FOK judgement experiment was aiming at identifying.

Answer 21

Aimed at identifying whether participants had higher accuracy with things they subjectivly believed they recognised (‘FK’ (feeling known) items)

Question 22

What were the results of the Hart (1965) FOK experiment?

Important for exam

Answer 22

Mean relationship between accuracy and feeling of knowing for items they felt they remembered was .66 compared to .38.

• However, there is huge variability in the individual differences between when people thought they were right and then actually were right.*
• People tend to have a good idea whether they are right or wrong and some people have a better idea of this than others*

Question 23

Explain the Underwood (1966) EOL judgements experiment was trying to discover.

Answer 23

Whether ease of learning judgements predict recall performance.

Question 24

What were the results of the Underwood (1966) experiment?

Answer 24

Strong correlation between average ‘speed of learning’ judgements and accuracy

There was a higher accuracy when people knew they were going to be tested (intentional recall) .91 when they didn’t know (surprise recall) .77.

Still individual differences, some people are better at picking the items they believe they will easily learn compared to being difficult to learn.

Question 25

How accurate are metacognitive judgements according to the Underwood (1966) study?

Answer 25

Intermediate accuracy

(above chance but far from perfect)

Question 26

What are the three theories called regarding how we make metacognitive judgements

Answer 26

Direct Access View

Inferential View

Hybrid View

Question 27

What is the Direct Access View for desribing how we make metacognitive judgements?

Answer 27

Judgements are made on the basis of features of the target that can be accessed or retrieved

• e.g. people access some notion of memory strength for a learned item*
• e.g. Hart - for a non-recalled item, a memory monitoring process ascertains whether the item is stored -> FOK*
• We have direct access to the strength of encoding somehow*

Question 28

What are the implications about metacognitive judgements according to the Direct Access View?

Answer 28

Weakly stored info should not be predicted to be more recallable than more strongly stored info.

Question 29

What is the Inferential Access View for desribing how we make metacognitive judgements?

Answer 29

Metacognitive judgements are based on a host of cues and clues.

• • Generated by the act of learning or remembering something*
• • Comes from knowledge-specific info about own memory*

Question 30

In the inferential view of metacognitive judgements are inferences conscious or non-conscious?

Answer 30

Largely non-conscious

• revealed as a ‘feeling’; or based on a inference about what makes information memorable*
• e.g. ease of retrieval is a cue, or the amount of retrieved information could be a cue. These all feed into our metacognition about what makes things memorable.*

Question 31

What is the Hybrid View for the basis of how we make metacognitive judgements?

Who developed the theory?

Answer 31

There is a hybrid between the direct access and inferential view.

Metacognitive judgements are based on experienced-based cues and information-based cues.

Developed by: Koriat

Question 32

What are experience-based cues according to the Hybrid View of metacognitive judgements?

important for exam

Answer 32

Sheer feeling arising from some aspect of remembering, learning or failing to remember

• Things like ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon: seeing a photo of someone you recognise but cant remember their name*
• also*
• Things like fluency, retrieval (phenomenological experience), affect*

Question 33

What are information-based cues according to the Hybrid View of metacognitive judgements?

Answer 33

A-priori theories and analytical inferences about the impact of various factors on memory

• e.g. ‘“he longer a stimulus is present for, the more likely I will later remember it”*
• “The longer the delay between learning and test, the worse I do on the test”*
• “The more I practice an item the more likely I’ll remember it”*