The speed of metacognition: Taking time to get to know one’s structural knowledge

The time course of different metacognitive experiences of knowledge was investigated using artificial grammar learning. Experiment 1 revealed that when participants are aware of the basis of their judgments (conscious structural knowledge) decisions are made most rapidly, followed by decisions made with conscious judgment but without conscious knowledge of underlying structure (unconscious structural knowledge), and guess responses (unconscious judgment knowledge) were made most slowly, even when controlling for differences in confidence and accuracy. In experiment 2, short response deadlines decreased the accuracy of unconscious but not conscious structural knowledge. Conversely, the deadline decreased the proportion of conscious structural knowledge in favour of guessing. Unconscious structural knowledge can be applied rapidly but becomes more reliable with additional metacognitive processing time whereas conscious structural knowledge is an all-or-nothing response that cannot always be applied rapidly. These dissociations corroborate quite separate theories of recognition (dual-process) and metacognition (higher order thought and cross-order integration).     

重量对元认知监控的无意识影响

采用结构知识归因的方法,以学习判断和项目优先选择作为元认知监测和控制的指标,考察重量对元认知监控的影响是否是无意识的。被试学习粘贴在不同重量纸盒上的词对,进行学习判断(实验1)或项目选择(实验2),并报告其判断或选择的依据。结果:(1)重量影响学习判断和项目优先选择,相对于轻纸盒,被试给予重纸盒上的词对更高的JOL并优先选择重纸盒上的词对进行学习;(2)重量对学习判断的影响只发生在判断依据为猜测的情况下,重量对项目优先选择的影响只发生在判断依据为猜测和直觉的情况下。上述结果支持了元认知的具身性,并提示重量对元认知监控的影响可能是无意识的。     

Metacognitive Experiences and Human Judgment: The Case of Hindsight Bias and Its Debiasing

ABSTRACT— Theories of judgment have emphasized the influence of what comes to mind—the content of people's thoughts. But recent research shows that metacognitive experiences accompanying thinking, like a sense of the ease or difficulty with which information comes to mind, qualify the conclusions that people derive from thought content. The case of hindsight bias and attempts to remove that bias (debiasing) illustrate this. After an event outcome is known, people display hindsight bias by exaggerating its inevitability, believing they "knew it all along." The magnitude of hindsight bias varies with the ease or difficulty that known or alternative outcomes come to mind; the usually observed hindsight bias may even reverse when outcomes are difficult to bring to mind or increase when alternatives are difficult to bring to mind. Implications of metacognitive experiences can extend to other biases and their debiasing, as well as to how people make sense of the past more generally.     

Task performance and metacognitive experiences in problem-solving

The effects of task performance on metacognitive experiences and relations between task performance and metacognitive experiences in problem-solving were examined with 69 Japanese undergraduate students. The task was a puzzle called the cross breaker, consisting of seven pieces, and several figures were constructed by using those seven pieces. Eight types of metacognitive experiences, before and after performing the task, were rated. Participants were classified into Success and Failure groups based on their task performance. Use of all but two metacognitive experiences differed between the groups. There were medium to high positive and negative correlations for metacognitive experiences with performance after the puzzle task, whereas metacognitive experiences before the task generally had no significant correlations with performance. Despite small N, participants' metacognitive experiences seemed to reflect their actual performance, suggesting that people obtain information from their performance and use it to revise their metacognitive experiences. Furthermore, metacognitive experiences may help people solve similar problems in the future.     

Overcoming intuition: metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning

Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency during the process of reasoning. Incidental experiences of difficulty or disfluency--receiving information in a degraded font (Experiments 1 and 4), in difficult-to-read lettering (Experiment 2), or while furrowing one's brow (Experiment 3)--reduced the impact of heuristics and defaults in judgment (Experiments 1 and 3), reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion (Experiment 2), and improved syllogistic reasoning (Experiment 4). Metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency appear to serve as an alarm that activates analytic forms of reasoning that assess and sometimes correct the output of more intuitive forms of reasoning.     

Do metacognitive judgments alter memory performance beyond the benefits of retrieval practice? A comment on and replication attempt of Dougherty,Scheck, Nelson,and Narens (2005)

A central question in the metacognitive literature concerns whether the act of making a metacognitive judgment alters one’s memory for the information about which the judgment was made. Dougherty, Scheck, Nelson, and Narens (2005, Memory & Cognition, 33(6), 1096–1115) attempted to address this question by having participants make either retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs; i.e., evaluations of past retrieval success), judgments of learning (JOLs; i.e., predictions of future retrieval success), or no explicit judgments. When comparing final retrieval accuracy they found that accuracy was greater for items where participants had made JOLs compared with items that received RCJs or no judgment, suggesting that simply making a JOL can improve later memory performance. The present article presents results from four separate replication attempts that fail to duplicate this finding. Combined results provide compelling evidence that making a metacognitive judgment, regardless of the type, has no impact on later memory performance above and beyond retrieval practice.     

ACTIVITÉ MÉTACOGNITIVE DE L'ENFANT ET DIFFICULTÉ DE LA TÂCHE COGNITIVE

The influence of the type of difficulty of a cognitive task on metacognitive activity (metacognitive experiences and metacognitive strategies) was studied in six- and eight-year-old children. Children had to make decisions about the correspondence of statements and drawings presented in pairs one after the other, starting either with a statement, or with a picture. They encounter two kinds of difficulties: (1) one due to the information conveyed by drawing (non-correspondence with the statement); (2) another due to the order in which the statements and drawings are presented: when the drawing comes first the child must retain it in his memory until a statement can guide him in his decoding of it; this difficulty is unexpected given the expectations the child has due to the cognitive task proposed. The principal findings were as follows: (1) Compared to the six-year-olds, the eight-year-olds demonstrated three times more metacognitive control strategies for expressing information, more cognitive skills (reasoning), and a higher level of performance (understanding and recall). (2) The two types of difficulties do not have the same effects: (a) the difficulty due to the information conveyed by the drawing leads to an increase in the latency time; the performance (understanding) is not as good; (b) in the case of difficulty due to the statement-drawing order, twice as many verbalizations expressing metacognitive experiences and a decrease in the latency time were observed. The interpretation of the findings underscores the importance for the child of the indicators he has to orient him in mobilizing metacognitive and cognitive activities.     

Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer: Discrepantly fluent violations are deemed less morally wrong

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that discrepancies in processing fluency influence the perceived wrongness of moral violations. Participants were presented with numerous moral violations in easy or difficult to read font. For some violations experienced perceptual fluency was consistent with the fluency associated with previous violations, whereas for others it was more fluent or more disfluent. Results show that, across multiple vignettes, participants rated moral violations that were processed with discrepant fluency as less morally wrong than those processed with discrepant disfluency. The current work highlights the importance of metacognitive experiences in moral judgment and contributes to the emerging literature on the role of experiential factors in moral judgment.     

A dual-process account of the development of scientific reasoning: The nature and development of metacognitive intercession skills

Metacognitive knowledge of the dual-processing basis of judgment is critical to resolving conflict between analytic and experiential processing responses [Klaczynski, P. A. (2004). A dual-process model of adolescent development: Implications for decision making, reasoning, and identity. In R. V. Kail (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior, Vol. 31 (pp. 73–123). San Diego, CA: Academic Press]. Such conflict is ubiquitous when reasoning scientifically. Three studies explored the nature, development, and stability of this metacognitive knowledge. In each study, participants completed the ratio-bias judgment task, which assessed their tendency to make analytically based responses, and the ratio-bias evaluation task, which assessed their metacognitive knowledge of the processing basis of judgments on the task (Metacognitive Status). In Study 1, college students’ judgment performance was related to metacognitive status but not to general cognitive ability. In Study 2, metacognitive status was related to age and mathematics-related changes. Metacognitive status again predicted participants’ tendency to make analytically based judgments. In Study 3, college students’ judgments, but not metacognitive status, were affected by task conditions. The evidence suggests that assessing metacognitive knowledge is important for understanding how conflict between analytically and experientially based judgments is resolved.     

延时间隔和线索类型对遗忘学习判断的影响*

主要探讨不同延时间隔和线索类型对遗忘元认知判断的影响。采用传统的学习判断任务,让被试学习40对无意义配对词,并告知随后进行测试,当呈现第一个词时,被试能够回忆与之配对的后一个词。让被试预测当延迟不同时间（5分钟、1天和1周）进行测试时,他们能够记住（学习判断）或者遗忘（遗忘判断）后一词的可能性。最后,要求被试回忆所有词对。结果发现延时间隔对学习判断和遗忘判断有相似的影响;学习判断的等级和相对准确性均高于遗忘判断,说明人们对记住和遗忘的线索很敏感;相比于学习判断,人们监测自己遗忘能力的信心不足。研究结果表明人们能够利用延时间隔和线索类型来预测未来的测验成绩,对遗忘的监测能力低于对记住的监测。     

反馈干预对学习判断的影响

将反馈干预作为外部线索引入元记忆研究,采用重复学习任务,在第一轮次学习-测验之后插入反馈干预,用两个实验分别考查任务反馈和能力反馈两种形式下的反馈效价对第二轮次即时学习判断的影响.结果表明：①在学习过程中,学习者会进行自我监测;②在任务反馈形式下,反馈信息与自我监测信息冲突,导致反馈干预对元认知监测和认知过程没有影响;③在能力反馈形式下,反馈信息与自我监测信息的冲突消失,结果消极反馈影响了元认知监测.由此得出结论：只有在不与自我监测信息冲突的情况下,反馈干预才对学习判断产生影响.此外,在有反馈干预的情况下,两个实验中都出现了显著的练习伴随低估效应.     

Metacognitive illusions can be reduced by monitoring recollection during study

Prior work has shown that judgments of learning (JOLs) are prone to an auditory metacognitive illusion such that loud words are given higher predictions than quiet words despite no differences in recall as a function of auditory intensity. The current study investigated whether judgments of remembering and knowing (JORKs)—judgments that focus participants on whether or not recollective details will be remembered—are less susceptible to such an illusion. In Experiment 1, participants studied single words, making item-by-item JOLs or JORKs immediately after study. Indeed, although increased volume elevated judgement magnitude for both JOLs and JORKs, the effect was significantly attenuated when JORKs were elicited. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and additionally demonstrated that participants making JORKs were less likely than participants making JOLs to choose to restudy quiet words relative to loud words. Taken together, these results suggest that JORKs are impacted less—in terms of both metacognitive monitoring and control—by irrelevant perceptual information than JOLs. More generally, these data support the contention that metacognitive illusions can be attenuated by simply changing the way metacognitive judgments are solicited, an important finding given that subjective experiences guide self-regulated learning.     

Confidence judgments by humans and rhesus monkeys

Researchers have begun to evaluate animals' metacognitive capacities. Continuing this evaluation, the present authors asked whether monkeys could use the analog of a confidence-rating scale to judge retrospectively their accuracy in a psychophysical discrimination. Monkeys and human participants classified stimuli as dense or sparse without feedback. Then, they made a secondary confidence judgment by choosing responses that risked different levels of timeout but could earn different levels of reward. Human participants were instructed to use these responses to express levels of confidence. They used 2- and 3-level confidence-rating scales appropriately. Monkeys used the 2-level scale appropriately--especially one who performed almost identically to humans. Neither monkey used the 3-level scale as the humans did. These studies place humans and animals for the first time in the identical risk-taking situation that collects declarative confidence judgments from humans. They demonstrate the first retrospective reports of uncertainty by non-human primates while also suggesting their limits in this area.     

Confidence judgments in real classroom settings: monitoring performance in different types of tests

During testing, students have a valuable opportunity to exercise and improve their self-regulatory skills. However, the extent to which they profit from those experiences may vary according to some personal, test-related, and environmental factors. This study investigated the effects of metacognitive skills and test types on students' test performances, confidence judgments, and on the accuracy of those judgments. A sample of 129 psychology undergraduate students (50 men and 79 women, mean age = 18.9 years) were categorized according to their metacognitive skills (high vs average vs low) and had their test performances and monitoring processes in two different types of tests (i.e., multiple-choice and short-answer tests) compared throughout one academic term. Their test preparation practices, along with their attributional and regulatory processes during test-taking, were also compared by using open-ended questions. The results showed that: (1) high-metacognitive students presented more effective test preparation practices, better test performances, and superior attributional, regulatory, and monitoring processes than their counterparts; (2) differences in performance and judgment accuracy were significantly larger in the short-answer tests than in the multiple-choice tests; and (3) over time, students' performances and confidence levels varied in specific patterns according to the type of test being taken. The results are discussed, focusing on the educational implications of the interactions observed and on how they may determine what students can learn from test-taking experiences. In addition, based on the results obtained, specific suggestions on how to increase the metacognitive awareness of university students through instruction and on how to improve their academic assessment are provided.     

Criticism of the Theory of Motivation

The theory of motivation is a theory which takes the executora＇s motivation as the basis of moral judgment. One presupposition of the theory is that motivation can be a common object of understanding. However, motivation exists only in the heart of the executor, and cannot be known exactly by others, so motivation cannot be perceived like a common object, and thus, logically, cannot be the basis of moral judgment. Even if the executor＇s motivation is accepted by others and turned into a common object, the motivation still cannot become the valid basis of a moral judgment. This is the dilemma of the theory of motivation. In practice, the dilemma appears as follows： if one insists on the theory of motivation, one can be led to the result that people do evil with good intentions. However, just because motivation cannot be the basis of moral judgment does not mean that motivation is of no significance. Good motivation is always better than evil motivation. Therefore, in moral education we should carry out motivation education and teach people to strive to have good motivations for their behavior. This is the value of motivation theory.     

Singular Clues to Causality and Their Use in Human Causal Judgment

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions are derived from the 14. Research on the use of empirical information and conditional probabilities to identify causes has used scenarios in which several of the clues are present, and the use of empirical association information for causal judgment depends on the presence of singular clues. It is the singular clues and their origin that are basic to causal understanding, not multiple instance clues such as empirical association, contingency, and conditional probabilities.     

Epistemic emotions: Cognitive underpinnings and relations with metacognitive feelings

The aim of this paper is to review research on epistemic emotions in learning. The emphasis is not only on the cognitive states that give rise to epistemic emotions but also on the dynamics of epistemic emotions in complex learning situations. The interrelations between epistemic emotions and their interactions with affective states and metacognitive experiences are also explored. The position put forth is that epistemic emotions are triggered by cognitive states involving discrepancy, or conflict, between active schemas and incoming information, or gap in one's knowledge. However, each of the epistemic emotions has its specific triggering conditions that differentiate it from the others. Changing conditions during a cognitive endeavor impact the intensity as well as the interrelations between epistemic emotions. Also, there are relations between epistemic emotions and metacognitive experiences such as feeling of difficulty or confidence, albeit not so strong. The implications for future research are discussed.     

Changing people’s views of outgroups through individual-to-group generalisation: meta-analytic reviews and theoretical considerations

Through individual-to-group generalisation, information about individual members of stigmatised social groups changes the outgroup judgment. This article reports meta-analytic reviews of over 30 years of experimental, lab-based research on individual-to-group generalisation (107 independent tests; 5393 participants). In a first meta-analysis, a positive, medium-size generalisation effect was detected (r = .28, p < .001), reflecting significant generalisation of outgroup exemplar information to the outgroup judgment. This effect was moderated by the number of exemplars and exemplar typicality, with more moderately atypical exemplars maximising generalisation effects. Several other design parameters—including type of control condition, generalisation measures, mode of information provision, type of target outgroup and origin of study—did not moderate the positive generalisation effect. A second meta-analysis investigated the interplay between metacognitions and generalisation and found assimilation effects with metacognitive triggers encouraging exemplar inclusion, and contrast effects with metacognitive cues encouraging exemplar exclusion. These results demonstrate that the same outgroup exemplar can lead to bias reduction or bias exacerbation, depending on available meta-cognitive cues. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for intergroup psychology, generalisation theory and bias reduction interventions.     

The effects of mood and retrieval cues on semantic memory and metacognition

We investigated whether the previously established effect of mood on episodic memory generalizes to semantic memory and whether mood affects metacognitive judgments associated with the retrieval of semantic information. Sixty-eight participants were induced into a happy or sad mood by viewing and describing IAPS images. Following mood induction, participants saw a total of 200 general knowledge trivia items (50 open-ended and 50 multiple-choice after each of two mood inductions) and were asked to provide a metacognitive judgment about their knowledge for each item before providing a response. A sample trivia item is: Author – – To kill a mockingbird. Results indicate that mood affects the retrieval of semantic information, but only when the participant believes they possess the requested semantic information; furthermore, this effect depends upon the presence of retrieval cues. In addition, we found that mood does not affect the likelihood of different metacognitive judgments associated with the retrieval of semantic information, but that, in some cases, having retrieval cues increases accuracy of these metacognitive judgments. Our results suggest that semantic retrieval processes are minimally susceptible to the influence of affective state but does not preclude the possibility that affective state may influence encoding of semantic information.     

LEARNING WITHIN A LEARNER CONTROL TRAINING ENVIRONMENT: THE INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF GOAL ORIENTATION AND METACOGNITIVE INSTRUCTION ON LEARNING OUTCOMES

This study proposes that effective engagement in metacognitive activities is critical to success in high learner-control training environments. A model was developed that focuses on the interactive effects of goal orientation and a metacognitive training intervention on metacognitive activity and learning outcomes. Seventy-nine participants completed a Web-based training course on how to create Web pages. Consistent with expectations, learners reporting greater levels of metacognitive activity during training gained more declarative knowledge, performed better on a skill-based measure, and had higher levels of self-efficacy. Metacognitive activity was also found to partially mediate the relationship between goal orientation and learning outcomes. Finally, the expected goal orientation by intervention interaction was found. The metacognitive intervention was beneficial in enhancing metacognitive activity for trainees with low performance-avoidance orientations, but resulted in lower metacognitive activity among highly avoidant learners. Implications of these findings for research on self-regulation and training practice are discussed.