Metacognition Flashcards
(37 cards)
What is metacognition?
- Processes involved in monitoring and controlling performance on a task
- an awareness of one’s own thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them.
- How a human adapts memory performance using the things they know about their memory
Why study metacognition?
- Traditional experimental memory paradigms don’t capture this aspect of cognition
- Early studies looked at the amount they could recall not the way in which they did it
- Traditional memory paradigms don’t reflect the operation of memory in real world environments
- What we learn could be used to improve many decisions based on information accessed from memory
what are the 2 key assumptions the meta-cognitive approach is based on
- humans have the ability to monitor their own cognitive experience
- This subjective experience that arises from monitoring plays a causal role in determining current and future cognitive operations
how does monitoring and control work (object level and meta-level)
examples
object level > meta level = monitoring- we monitor our subjective experience of feeling
e.g. check you understand what you are reading
meta level > object level = control- determines current and future cognitive operations (how long you might continue thinking about it for
e.g. re-reading a paragraph
what is monitoring, how is it measured
- Processes that allow us to observe and reflect on our cognition
- Monitoring means the ability to judge successfully one’s own cognitive processes, and control means the ability to use those judgments to alter behaviour
- Measured by asking people to report their own monitoring
what are 4 measures of monitoring?
- ease of learning
- judgment of knowing
- feeling of knowing
- confidence
ease of learning?
before you learn each item, how difficult will it be for you to learn it
judgment of learning?
for each of the items you have learned, how likely is it you will be able to recall them later
feeling of knowing
tip of tongue state
For items that you are not able to recall, how likely is it that you would recognise the item from among a set of possible items?
confidence?
• For items that you recall/recognise, how likely is it that your decision is correct?
what is control
- Conscious and non-conscious decisions we make based on the output of our monitoring processes
- Revealed by behaviours (measurement of what people do)
name measures of control
- Self-paced study time (measure how long someone looks at stimulus for)
- Response time (recognition and recall)
- Quantity of information reported (things they say)
- Veridicality/ correspondence of information reported e.g. an item could say a person wears a red jumper, how does this correspond with original item shown
- Grain-size of information reported (how detailed a report is, we can ask people to bet on how wrong/right they think they are)
- Many of them are verbal
Example of metacognition in action: studying for exams
• You have to decide when you have learned enough
• You could measure:
> Monitoring: judgements of learning
> Control: amount of time spent studying each item
what did hart (1965) look at
looked at feeling of knowing judgements predict performance on recognition test
what did Underwood (1966) look at
looked at whether ease of learning judgements predicted recall performance
what paradigm Hart’s (1965) study use
what type of questions were did participants answer
• Recall-judgement-recognition paradigm was used
• The focus on general knowledge questions (semantic memory) NOT episodic
• Participants answered 50 or 75 general knowledge questions e.g. what is the capital of Japan?
• Participant fails to recall the answer- how likely will you be able to recognise the answer if we present you with a set of possible answers?
> Either gave Yes/no or ratings on a scale of 1-6 (wouldn’t recognise, through to would recognise it)
> Multiple-choice recognition of all items e.g. a) Kyoto, b) Tokyo, etc
what were the findings from Hart’s (1965) study
what does this tell us about people’s metacognitive knowledge?
When they were correct, more likely to say they knew the answer (felt they knew)
> There is quite a lot of variability across participants
> FOK=items participants felt they would not know, percentages were lower
> M=.66 vs. .38
> Some people have good metacognitive knowledge, and some people don’t
what were the findings from Hart’s (1965) study
what does this tell us about people’s metacognitive knowledge?
For items they would know the items, they had higher correct recalls
For items they would not know or recognise them, they had fewer percentage of items they got correct
> There is quite a lot of variability across participants
> FOK=items participants felt they would not know, percentages were lower
> M=.66 vs. .38
> Some people have good metacognitive knowledge, and some people don’t
what did Underwood’s (1966)- ease of learning judgements (EOL) study comprise of
what paradigm was used
what did participants do
what were the 2 conditions
- Paradigm in this experiment involved 27 “triagram” (3 letters), easy -> difficult: BUG, CES, XFH
- Participants judged the speed with which they would learn each trigram
- Surprise recall test and Intentional learning conditions: over 6 study-recall blocks
what were the results of Underwood’s (1966)- ease of learning judgements (EOL) study?
- Key question: Do judgements predict recall performance? Answer is yes, not too badly
- Correlation between average ‘speed of learning’ judgements and accuracy
- Surprise recall r=.77
- Intentional recall r=.91 (when people knew they would have to recall the information)
- Some people had really strong correlation, some had poor correlation
- Reasonable correlations for individuals too (mean r of .48), but some individual differences
- Metacognitive judgements are of intermediate accuracy (above chance but far from perfect)
what is the direct access view, implication of this?
• 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 (1965-67): for a non-recalled item, a memory monitoring process ascertains whether the item is stored -> FOK
Implication: weakly stored information should not be predicted to be more recallable than more strongly stored information
what is the inferential view, describe what inferences may be
• Judgements are based on a host of cues and clues generated from 2 sources:
1. Generated by act of learning or remembering
2. From knowledge-specific info about own memory
Inferences may be:
> Largely non-conscious, revealed as a “feeling” or
> Based on a theory about what makes information memorable
• E.g. ease of retrieval: amount of information retrieved
what is the hybrid view and what 2 cues does it consist of
Koriat said metacognitive judgements are based on experienced based cues and information based cues
what are experienced based cues
• Sheer feeling arising from some aspect of remembering, learning or failing to remember
> Interpretation of what that means
> E.g. looking at a photo of someone famous but cannot recall their name
> Tip of the tongue is an example of experienced based cue
