Metacognition Flashcards
What is metacognition
Processes involved in monitoring/controlling performance on a task
Levels of cognitive operations
- Object level (includes your actions/behaviours)
- Meta-level (mental simulation that keeps track of what’s going on at the object-level)
- It’s a process model of a flow of information
- Monitoring process –> (object-level to meta-level) , monitors our cognitive operations and results in subjective experience or feeling
- Control process –> (meta-level to object level), subjective experience from monitoring determines current and future cognitive operations
Using these levels - E.g. how tall is/was the world’s tallest person?
- So at the object level you search your memory
- While you are doing this search, you are also monitoring (object-meta level) whats going on, so you might come up with some possible candidate answers/subjective feelings about possible answers
- you also, based on subjective experiences, exert control over the answer you give and modify behaviour to achieve goal
Measures of monitoring
- Ease of learning - Before you learn the items, how difficult will it be to learn each item?
- Judgement of learning - for each of the items you have learned, how likely is it that you will recall them later?
- Feeling-of-knowing - for items that you are not able to recall, how likely is it that you would recognise them from among a set of possible items? (strong FOK –> TOT phenomenon (tip of tongue))
- Confidence - for items that you recall/recognise, how likely is it that your answer is correct?
Measures of control
- Self-paced study time
- Response time (recognition and recall)
- Quantity of information reported
- Verdicality/correspondence of info reported (how accurate
- Grain-size of info reported (level of detail)
Examples of metacognition in action- studying for exams
- you have to decide when you have learned enough
- monitoring: Judgements of learning
- Control: amount of time spent studying
Does monitoring work? can people accurately monitor cognitive processes?
Hart (1965) - FOK judgements predict performance on recognition test
Underwood (1966): EOL Judgements predict recall performance
Hart (1965)
- FOK judgements
- Recall-judgement-recognition paradigm
- 50 or 75 general knowledge questions e.g. who wrote the ‘tempest’?
- If participant fails to recall an answer, could you recognise the answer if we present you with a set of possible answers? YES/NO or ratings 1-6
- Multiple-choice recognition test of all items.
- Is accuracy higher for ‘FK items’?
- FK items that they felt they would know, MC was higher than FK items participants felt they would not know
Typical approaches to memory
- Typical laboratory paradigm
- Storehouse metaphor
Typical-learning paradigm
List-learning experiment
- memory performance measured by % of items recalled/recognised
Storehouse metaphor: quantity reiented
- Memory as a storage place
- Contents as discrete elements
- Memory assessed in input-bound manner - how much of the input is correctly remembered
- Forgetting is a loss of elements
Correspondence approach to memory
Everyday memory research - e.g. eyewitness report of a crime. Memory performance measured by faithfulness to past event
Correspondence metaphor: accuracy-oriented
- memory is about past events
- focus on accuracy of report of original event
- content is important
- memory is assessed in output-bound manner - begin with output, examine accordance with input
- forgetting is a loss of correspondence
Measuring memory accuracy - EXAMPLE
- Ss asked to study a list of words
- Later given a list of cue words and asked to write a word from the previously studied list.
- Performance: 8 word correct, 2 words incorrect, 2 blanks
- ‘Quantity’ = 8/12 = 67%
- ‘Accuracy’ = 8/10 = 80%
- The latter approach is more important for eyewitness memory, etc
Recall-recognition paradox
What is it?
- Recognition is better in lab. Recall is better in eyewitness studies.
Why does it occur?
- Memory property under consideration: Accuracy vs. quantity
- Response option: Forced vs. free
- Test format: recall vs. recognition
Koriat & Goldsmith
a model of monitoring and control in memory
found: test format (recall vs. recognition) - did affect quantity, did not affect accuracy (much) response option (free vs. forced) - did not affect quantity - did affect accuracy
Implications for free-report memory performance
- Within the frame work, free-report memory performance depends on 4 factors:
1. overall retention - Amount of correct information that can be retrieved.
2. Monitoring effectiveness - the extent to which assessed probabilities differentiate correct vs. incorrect candidate answers
3. Control sensitivity - the extent to which volunteering or withholding information is based on monitoring output
4. Report criterion setting - Above which answers are volunteered
- below which answers are withheld
Assumptions about memory performance
- At retrieval, we can’t change the amount of information in memory
- but we can enhance accuracy of report by choosing what to volunteer or withhold - Based on subjective confidence
- Reasonable but imperfect monitoring effectiveness –> quantity-accuracy tradeoff
Quantity/accuracy trade off & monitoring effectiveness
….
Basis for metacognitive judgements
- Direct Access View
- Inferential View
Direct Access View
Judgements are made on the basis of features of the targets that can be accessed or retrieved.
- we can directly index the strength of our memory
