Metacognitive monitoring of attention performance and its influencing factors

Metacognitive monitoring is a central element of metacognitive processing exerting widespread influences on information processing. Albeit being subject to numerous empirical investigations referring to memory performance, there is little research investigating metacognitive monitoring in other cognitive domains. The present study investigated in 45 healthy students whether factors that are known to influence monitoring of memory performance, i.e. task difficulty, time of assessment, and practice, also exhibit a significant impact on monitoring of attention performance. A multivariate analysis of variance with three within-subject repeated measures factors on two dependent variables (monitoring of (a) time, and (b) errors in an attention task) was conducted. Results showed that monitoring ability significantly decreased with increasing task difficulty, was significantly better for post than for pre-assessment, and significantly increased with practice. Therefore, results suggest that the examined factors influenced monitoring of attention performance equivalent to the influence of these factors found in metamemory research.     

An Indirect Argument for the Access Theory of Privacy

Res Publica - In this paper, I offer an indirect argument for the Access Theory of privacy. First, I develop a new version of the rival Control Theory that is immune to all the classic objections...     

Too Much Info: Data Surveillance and Reasons to Favor the Control Account of the Right to Privacy

Res Publica - In this paper, we argue that there is at least a pro tanto reason to favor the control account of the right to privacy over the access account of the right to privacy. This conclusion...     

Privacy Rights,and Why Negative Control is Not a Dead End: A Reply to Munch and Lundgren

Lauritz Munch and Björn Lundgren have recently replied to a paper published by us in this journal. In our original paper, we defended a novel version of the so-called ‘control theory’ of the moral right to privacy. We argued that control theorists should define ‘control’ as what we coined ‘Negative Control’. Munch and Lundgren have recently provided a range of interesting and challenging objections to our view. Independently of each other, they give almost identical counterexamples to our definition of Negative Control. In this comment, we show that while the counterexamples are genuine counterexamples, they do not force us to abandon the idea of Negative Control. Furthermore, we reply to two additional objections raised by Lundgren. One of these replies involves giving a new account of what the relation is between the concept of privacy and the right to privacy.