There is a remarkable gap in the academic literature when it comes to group navigation, and procedural metacognition in group navigation is an important but virtually unexplored topic. The present paper aims to fill this gap by providing an account of how metacognitive feelings evaluate and regulate group navigational processes. The paper reviews animal studies and ethnographic work to elucidate three exiting processes in human group navigation: many-wrongs, leadership and emergent sensing. This is followed by an analysis of (...) the role of procedural metacognition in the navigational processes involved in each of these three processes. This analysis shows that procedural metacognition serves to regulate and evaluate group navigation in a flexible, process-specific way. When performance issues arise during group navigation, the emergence of negative affective states makes the navigational process conspicuous, prompting a modulation of said process. (shrink)

How do we control what we do not do? What are the relevant guiding mental states when an agent intentionally omits to perform an action? I argue that what happens when an agent intentionally omits is a two-part metacognitive process in which a representation of an action is brought to the agent’s mind for further processing and evaluated by her as something not to be done. Without a representation of the action not done, the agent cannot further process the possibility (...) of her own action; she cannot intentionally try to not do something, resist performing an action, or decide or choose to not perform an action. The literature on people with frontal lobe damage suggests that without metacognitive control of action, a person automatically follows what the environment affords or what others are doing. Through at least procedural metacognitive control of action, agents are able to intentionally omit. This view has explanatory power over a variety of intentional omissions and over a variety of agents. It answers central questions in the philosophy of intentional omissions: who is capable of intentionally omitting, when and where intentional omissions unfold, and what are the relevant guiding mental states on which the control of intentional omissions is based? The answers to these questions contribute in part to naturalizing agency, at least when it comes to negative agency, our ability to guide the non-performance of our actions. (shrink)

How do we control what we do not do? What are the relevant guiding mental states when an agent intentionally omits to perform an action? I argue that what happens when an agent intentionally omits is a two-part metacognitive process in which a representation of an action is brought to the agent’s mind for further processing and evaluated by her as something not to be done. Without a representation of the action not done, the agent cannot further process the possibility (...) of her own action; she cannot intentionally try to not do something, resist performing an action, or decide or choose to not perform an action. The literature on people with frontal lobe damage suggests that without metacognitive control of action, a person automatically follows what the environment affords or what others are doing. Through at least procedural metacognitive control of action, agents are able to intentionally omit. This view has explanatory power over a variety of intentional omissions and over a variety of agents. It answers central questions in the philosophy of intentional omissions: who is capable of intentionally omitting, when and where intentional omissions unfold, and what are the relevant guiding mental states on which the control of intentional omissions is based? The answers to these questions contribute in part to naturalizing agency, at least when it comes to negative agency, our ability to guide the non-performance of our actions. (shrink)

When, how, and why students use conceptual knowledge during math problem solving is not well understood. We propose that when solving routine problems, students are more likely to recruit conceptual knowledge if their procedural knowledge is weak than if it is strong, and that in this context, metacognitive processes, specifically feelings of doubt, mediate interactions between procedural and conceptual knowledge. To test these hypotheses, in two studies (Ns = 64 and 138), university students solved fraction and decimal arithmetic (...) problems while thinking aloud; verbal protocols and written work were coded for overt uses of conceptual knowledge and displays of doubt. Consistent with the hypotheses, use of conceptual knowledge during calculation was not significantly positively associated with accuracy, but was positively associated with displays of doubt, which were negatively associated with accuracy. In Study 1, participants also explained solutions to rational arithmetic problems; using conceptual knowledge in this context was positively correlated with calculation accuracy, but only among participants who did not use conceptual knowledge during calculation, suggesting that the correlation did not reflect “online” effects of using conceptual knowledge. In Study 2, participants also completed a nonroutine problem‐solving task; displays of doubt on this task were positively associated with accuracy, suggesting that metacognitive processes play different roles when solving routine and nonroutine problems. We discuss implications of the results regarding interactions between procedural knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and metacognitive processes in math problem solving. (shrink)

There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even young (...) children have a capacity for procedural metacognition raises the question of whether and how these abilities are involved in conceptual development. More specifically, are there developmental changes in metacognitive abilities that have a wholescale effect on the way children acquire new concepts and replace existing concepts? We show that there is already evidence of at least one plausible example of such a link and argue that these connections deserve to be investigated systematically. (shrink)

Many policies and ethical guidelines recommend developing “trustworthy AI”. We argue that developing morally trustworthy AI is not only unethical, as it promotes trust in an entity that cannot be trustworthy, but it is also unnecessary for optimal calibration. Instead, we show that reliability, exclusive of moral trust, entails the appropriate normative constraints that enable optimal calibration and mitigate the vulnerability that arises in high-stakes hybrid decision-making environments, without also demanding, as moral trust would, the anthropomorphization of AI and thus (...) epistemically dubious behavior. The normative demands of reliability for inter-agential action are argued to be met by an analogue to procedural metacognitive competence (i.e., the ability to evaluate the quality of one’s own informational states to regulate subsequent action). Drawing on recent empirical findings that suggest providing reliability scores (e.g., F1-scores) to human decision-makers improves calibration in the AI system, we argue that reliability scores provide a good index of competence and enable humans to determine how much they wish to rely on the system. (shrink)

Procedural metacognition is the set of affect-based mechanisms allowing agents to regulate cognitive actions like perceptual discrimination, memory retrieval or problem solving. This article proposes that procedural metacognition has had a major role in the evolution of communication. A plausible hypothesis is that, under pressure for maximizing signalling efficiency, the metacognitive abilities used by nonhumans to regulate their perception and their memory have been re-used to regulate their communication. On this view, detecting one’s production errors in (...) signalling, or solving species-specific trade-offs between informativeness, processing effort, clarity, or urgency depend on a form of procedural metacognition, called “metacommunication”. How does this view relate to Gricean theories of human communication? A parallel between procedural trade-offs and conversational maxims is discussed for its evolutionary implications. Rather than accepting radically discontinuist interpretations, in which mindreading operates a full reorganization of pragmatics, it is proposed that procedural forms of regulation are entrenched in all forms of human communication. According to contextual demands, humans adopt and monitor more or less demanding informational goals, such as factual updating, clarifying, explaining, proving, and reaching consensus in collective matters. Under time pressure, only part of these goals require adopting others’ viewpoint. Efficiency in collective decision-making, in particular, might have been considerably raised by an ability to interpret others’ intentions and motivations. (shrink)

A reasoning process is more than an unfolding causal chain. Although some thoughts cause others in virtue of their contents, paradigmatic cases of personal-level inference involve something more, some appreciation that the conclusion follows from the premises. Both first-order processes and second-order beliefs have proven problematic or inadequate to account for the phenomenon. Thus, here I argue for an intermediate position, according to which an epistemic feeling, a form of procedural metacognition, plays this role. Extensive psychological research has (...) shown that epistemic feelings are involved in monitoring many kinds of cognitive process, affecting how the processes unfold. Inferences may be no different. Inferences are also plausibly accompanied by an epistemic feeling, in particular a feeling of reliability or unreliability. Such a feeling accounts for the phenomenological datum. It can also play a significant epistemic role for the thinker. (shrink)

Procedural metacognition is the set of affect-based mechanisms allowing agents to regulate cognitive actions like perceptual discrimination, memory retrieval or problem solving. This article proposes that procedural metacognition has had a major role in the evolution of communication. A plausible hypothesis is that, under pressure for maximizing signalling efficiency, the metacognitive abilities used by nonhumans to regulate their perception and their memory have been re-used to regulate their communication. On this view, detecting one’s production errors in (...) signalling, or solving species-specific trade-offs between informativeness, processing effort, clarity, or urgency depend on a form of procedural metacognition, called “metacommunication”. How does this view relate to Gricean theories of human communication? A parallel between procedural trade-offs and conversational maxims is discussed for its evolutionary implications. Rather than accepting radically discontinuist interpretations, in which mindreading operates a full reorganization of pragmatics, it is proposed that procedural forms of regulation are entrenched in all forms of human communication. According to contextual demands, humans adopt and monitor more or less demanding informational goals, such as factual updating, clarifying, explaining, proving, and reaching consensus in collective matters. Under time pressure, only part of these goals require adopting others’ viewpoint. Efficiency in collective decision-making, in particular, might have been considerably raised by an ability to interpret others’ intentions and motivations. (shrink)

Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in metarepresentation. It is concluded that, although (...) metarepresentations can redescribe metacognitive contents, metacognition and metarepresentation are functionally distinct. (shrink)

This article addresses the question whether epistemic emotions are in any sense inherently metacognitive. The paper begins with some critical discussion of a recent suggestion made by Joelle Proust, that these emotions might be implicitly or procedurally metacognitive. It then explores the theoretical resources that are needed to explain how such emotions arise and do their work. While there is a perennial temptation to think that epistemic emotions are somehow about the cognitive states of the person undergoing the emotion, we (...) will see that such views can and should be resisted. (shrink)

Given disagreements about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self-knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and scope of metacognition – the control of one's cognition - is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self-ascriptive view (or one-function view), has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one's own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one's own mind. The self-evaluative view (or (...) two-function view), in contrast, takes metacognition to involve a procedural form of knowledge that is generated by actually engaging in a first-order cognitive task, and monitoring its success. The comparative and developmental arguments supporting, respectively, each of these views are discussed in the light of Hampton's operational definition of metacognition. New arguments are presented in favor of the two-function view. Recent behaviorial and neuroscientific evidence suggests that metacognitive assessment relies on dedicated implicit mechanisms, which are wholly independent, and indeed dissociable, from theory-based self-attribution. The two-function view is claimed to be the best interpretation of these findings. (shrink)

One hundred and three participants solved conflict and non-conflict versions of four reasoning tasks using a two-response procedure: a base rate task, a causal reasoning task, a denominator neglect task, and a categorical syllogisms task. Participants were asked to give their first, intuitive answer, to make a Feeling of Rightness judgment, and then were given as much time as needed to rethink their answer. They also completed a standardized measure of IQ and the actively open-minded thinking questionnaire. The FORs of (...) both high- and low-capacity reasoners were responsive to conflict, such that FORs were lower for conflict relative to non-conflict problems. Consistent with the quantity hypothesis, high-capacity reasoners made a greater distinction between conflict and non-conflict items on measures of Type 2 thinking, namely, rethinking time and probability of changing answers. In contrast to the quality hypothesis, however, this rethinking time did not advantage the ability of the high-capacity group to produce normative answers, except for the base rate task. Indeed, we observed that the correlation between capacity and the probability of normative answers emerged at the initial response, rather than after rethinking. (shrink)

Recent studies have shown that self‐explanation is an effective metacognitive strategy, but how can it be leveraged to improve students' learning in actual classrooms? How do instructional treatments that emphasizes self‐explanation affect students' learning, as compared to other instructional treatments? We investigated whether self‐explanation can be scaffolded effectively in a classroom environment using a Cognitive Tutor, which is intelligent instructional software that supports guided learning by doing. In two classroom experiments, we found that students who explained their steps during problem‐solving (...) practice with a Cognitive Tutor learned with greater understanding compared to students who did not explain steps. The explainers better explained their solutions steps and were more successful on transfer problems. We interpret these results as follows: By engaging in explanation, students acquired better‐integrated visual and verbal declarative knowledge and acquired less shallow procedural knowledge. The research demonstrates that the benefits of self‐explanation can be achieved in a relatively simple computer‐based approach that scales well for classroom use. (shrink)

The scientific activity of Michael Faraday is examined by focusing on the procedural aspects of his activity. Procedurality is shown to be a fundamental characteristic of his work at a variety of levels: metacognitive, heuristic, schematic, and theoretical. The evolution of his ideas about the goals of science is shown to reflect fundamental roots in a procedural epistemology, closely tied to his concept of field. The implications of this analysis for the philosophy of science are briefly considered.

I defend an alternative to the two traditional accounts of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition: metacognition as primary versus social cognition as primary. These accounts have complementary explanatory vices and virtues. They also share a natural assumption: that interpretation in terms of mental states is “spectatorial”, aiming exclusively for an objective description of the mental facts about self and others. I argue that if one rejects this assumption in favor of the view that interpretation in terms (...) of mental states also plays important regulative roles with respect to minds and behavior, a new and superior conception of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition comes into view. On this conception, person-level metacognitive concepts are socio-cognitive tools that shape us into better cognitive agents and more predictable cognitive objects, thereby enhancing our abilities at social coordination. Mastery of these metacognitive concepts relies on subpersonal, non-conceptual, procedural metacognition. This reconceptualization of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition combines the complementary explanatory virtues of the two traditional conceptions, while avoiding their complementary explanatory vices. (shrink)

Starting from Proust’s distinction between the self-attributive and self-evaluative views on metacognition, this paper presents a third view: self-mindshaping. Based on the notion of mindshaping as the core of social cognition, the self-mindshaping view contends that mindshaping abilities can be turned on one’s own mind. Against the self-attributive view, metacognition is not a matter of accessing representations to metarepresent them but of giving shape to those representations themselves. Against the self-evaluative view, metacognition is not blind to content (...) but relies heavily on it. We characterize our view in terms of four issues that, according to Proust, distinguish the previous approaches, namely, whether metacognitive mechanisms are the same as those employed to access other minds, whether metacognitive control requires conceptual representation, whether metacognition is propositional, and whether metacognitive access is linked to mental action. After describing some of the mechanisms for self-mindshaping, we show how this view regards metacognition as grounded on social interaction mechanisms, conceptually driven, possibly, but not necessarily, propositional, and engaged in the practical regulation of mental states. Finally, we examine the prospects for the primacy of self-mindshaping as the primary metacognitive function. We argue that self-attributive processes typically subserve the practical goals emphasized by the mindshaping view, and that the evaluative role played by procedural metacognition can be grounded on social cues rather than on experiential feelings. Even if this is not enough to claim the primacy of self-mindshaping, it still appears as a third kind of metacognition, not reducible to the other two. (shrink)

In prior research, signal detection theory has been widely utilized to assess metacognitive ability. However, the SDT metacognitive model requires the use of a two-alternative forced-choice task, while confidence must also be measured discretely. In our model, participants’ cognitive ability and their confidence in the cognitive task were used to estimate their metacognitive abilities. Therefore, in this study, a metacognitive model that can be applied to various cognitive tasks was developed. This model implements the item response theory and Q-learning models (...) to estimate cognitive ability; participants’ metacognitive ability is defined as the discrepancy between their confidence in their cognitive ability and their actual cognitive ability. The entire procedure was divided into two experiments. In experiment 1, two different cognitive tasks were used to estimate metacognitive ability and to examine overall discriminative and convergent validity. Notably, the parameters representing metacognitive ability did not correlate with cognitive ability but were positively correlated between the two tasks. In experiment 2, we performed a similar analysis using a different task to test the replicability of experiment 1. The results for experiment 2 were replicated for discriminative and convergent validity, albeit with weak results. Our metacognitive model exhibited high interpretability and versatility. (shrink)

The main goal of our study was to investigate the role of insight into one’s own biases in the process of hypothesis validation in accordance to the two fundamental social perception domains on the example of confirmation bias. The study was conducted on a group of 593 participants with the use of a confirmation bias procedure, a free recall procedure and the Metacognitive Self scale. We manipulated with the domain and the value of information given to the respondents. We suspected (...) that individuals with a high metacognitive self, in opposition to low metacognitive self ones, would not process the given information according to the two fundamental social perception domains. The results verified the existence of an interaction effect of the metacognitive self and the domain of the information given about a perceived person on the susceptibility to follow the confirmation bias. Contrary to the low metacognitive self individuals, who show a higher tendency for the confirmation bias within the competence than the community domain, persons with a high insight into their own biases express the same level of confirmation bias in no respect to the domain of the information. The value of the information has no significant influence. (shrink)

Estimates of unknown quantities are influenced by both self-generated anchors (SGAs) and externally provided anchors (EPAs; e.g., the advice of others). It was hypothesised that people use the degree of similarity between these anchors to render final responses. Thus we tested predictions drawn from metacognitive accounts of anchoring using procedures similar to the traditional anchoring paradigm. In a single experiment we manipulated SGA–EPA similarity, EPA level, and EPA source credibility. Results showed that the relationship between SGA–EPA similarity and the decision (...) weight given to the EPA, relative to the weight given to the SGA, depended on source credibility. Bolstering the metacognitive framework, participants were most confident about their final responses when their SGA was similar to the EPA and the EPA came from a highly credible source. These results support a metacognitive account of the anchoring heuristic. (shrink)

A recent study has established that thinkers reliably engage in epistemic appraisals of concepts of natural categories. Here, five studies are reported which investigated the effects of different manipulations of category learning context on appraisal of the concepts learnt. It was predicted that dimensions of concept appraisal could be affected by manipulating either procedural factors or declarative factors. While known effects of these manipulations on metacognitive judgements such as category learning judgements and confidence at test were replicated, procedural (...) factors had no reliable effects on the dimensions of concept appraisal. Effects of declarative manipulations on some forms of concept appraisal were observed. (shrink)

This study develops conceptual means in philosophy of agency to better and more systematically address intentional omissions of agents, including those that are about resisting the action not done. I argue that even though philosophy of agency has largely concentrated on the actions of agents, when applying philosophy of action to the social sciences, a full-blown theoretical account of what agents do not do and a non-normative conceptual language of the phenomena in question is needed. Chapter 2 aims to find (...) out what kind of things intentional omissions are. I argue that although intentional omissions are part of our intentional behavior, they are not actions in the sense that the standard account of action assumes. Instead, because intentional omissions are homogenous, continuous, unbounded, indefinite and directly uncountable, they should be thought of as activities instead of performances. This view links the ontology of intentional omissions to the ontology of processes instead of to that of events, and I argue that this kind of ontology accounts for the fluid nature of the agency of alive agents not only instigating but controlling and sustaining their intentional omissions as well. Chapter 3 aims to find out on what conditions is an omission intentional. The aim is to find a naturalized explanation of them that would make it possible to combine psychological perspectives with philosophical ones so that intentional omissions could be treated as something that exist in the world, not just in our philosophical intuitions. I argue that intentional omissions necessarily require the agent’s procedural metacognition concerning the action not done. Based on this metacognition view, a non-normative conceptual typology of not doings is presented. Chapter 4 aims to find out on what conditions is an intentional omissions resistance toward something. The necessary elements of resistance are clarified and I argue that resistant intentional omissions in which the agent does not perform an action out of resistance toward something are a normal part of our everyday agency. The implications of the findings are considered for theories of action, especially when it comes to the belief-desire model that may not be able to fully account for resistant intentional omissions. Chapter 5 aims to find out what conceptual means do we have for talking about not doing something as a form of resistance. I argue that in the social sciences, bioethics and military ethics to not do something out of resistance is taken as something that exists, and as something that has causes and effects. However, concepts such as civil disobedience, conscientious refusing, exit and everyday resistance do not account for the ordinariness of this kind of not doings. Thus, I argue that such concepts are not able to fully cover resistant inaction and philosophy of intentional omissions can be of use not just in the social sciences. Finally, Chapter 6 considers the implications of these findings. The main implication of this study is that our view of social and ethical agency would need to better include intentional not doings, not just the sum of the intentional actions of agents. Another major implication is that agents themselves should be heard when analyzing their intentional omissions in society, because intentional omissions are phenomena that can easily be mixed with the passivities of agents from the perspective of an outside observer. (shrink)

This is a contribution to a book symposium on Joelle Proust’s The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (OUP). While there is much to admire in Proust’s book, the legitimacy of her distinction between “procedural” and “analytic” metacognition can be questioned. Doing so may help us better understand the relevance of animal metacognition studies to human self-knowledge.

People frequently report that their thought has, at times, a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently ‘talking’ to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, I argue that inner speech ‘utterances’ can constitute occurrent propositional attitudes, e.g., occurrent judgments, suppositions, etc., and, thereby, we can consciously reason through tokening a series of inner speech utterances in working memory. As I demonstrate, the functional role a mental state plays in working memory is determined in a (...) flexible and context sensitive manner by metacognitive monitoring and control procedures. An inner speech utterance functions as an occurrent judgment (and, thus, as a premise, lemma, or conclusion in a line of conscious reasoning) when it is experienced with a level of certainty that exceeds one’s threshold of confidence for acceptance. In virtue of an agent experiencing an inner speech utterance with a sufficient level of certainty, the utterance plays the functional role of an occurrent judgment through, e.g., terminating inquiry and causing overt actions (like overtly asserting the words rehearsed in inner speech). (shrink)

To study (un)conscious perception and test hypotheses about consciousness, researchers need procedures for determining whether subjects consciously perceive stimuli or not. This article is an introduction to a family of procedures called ‘confidence-based procedures’, which consist in interpreting metacognitive indicators as indicators of consciousness. I assess the validity and accuracy of these procedures, and answer a series of common objections to their use in consciousness research. I conclude that confidence-based procedures are valid for assessing consciousness, and, in most cases, accurate (...) enough for our practical and scientific purposes. (shrink)

This article presents and analyzes the basic features of wellbeing competence. Following a procedural approach to wellbeing, I propose wellbeing competence as a significant object of focus in the philosophical debate on wellbeing. Instead of being concerned one-sidedly with abstract ideals and explicit, theoretical knowledge about what constitutes wellbeing, wellbeing competence is the ability to handle the concrete process of living well and helping others live well in a generally qualified way. This article presents a theory that considers wellbeing (...) competence a complex form of knowing how. Further, it outlines central aspects and components of wellbeing competence. I suggest four components to play central functional roles in wellbeing competence when supplementing each other: empathy, emotional awareness, flexible perspective, and metacognition. (shrink)

Aristotle famously claimed that we perceive that we see or hear, and that this metaperception necessarily accompanies all conscious sensory experiences. In this essay I compare Aristotle’s account of metaperception with three main models of self-awareness to be found in the contemporary literature. The first model countenances introspection or inner sense as higher-order perception. The second model rejects introspection altogether, and maintains that judgments that we see or hear can be directly extracted from the first-order experience, using a procedure sometimes (...) called “an ascent routine.” The third model insists that the first-order experience has a twofold intentional structure: it is directed both at the perceived external object and at itself, i.e., reflexively. Although Aristotle’s own account is certainly closer to the third model (as Brentano rightly observed), the latter does not exhaust Aristotle’s insights on metaperception. One function of the common sense in Aristotle’s theory of perception is apparently to monitor the activity of our sensory modalities, and to make us aware that we see or hear independently of the sensory contents of our experience. I shall suggest that the monitoring function of perception is best understood in relation with contemporary cognitive science research on metacognition. Common sense is or involves a metaperceptual practical ability distinct from both object level sensory perception and metarepresentational knowledge about our senses. (shrink)

In defending a new framework for incorporating metacognitive debiasing strategies into critical thinking education, Jeffrey Maynes draws on ecological rationality theory to argue that in felicitous environments, agents will achieve greater epistemic success by relying on heuristics rather than more ideally rational procedures. He considers a challenge presented by Mercier and Sperber’s “interactionist” thesis that individual biases contribute to successful group reasoning. I argue that the challenge can be met without assuming an individualist ideal of the critical thinker as a (...) solitary reasoner. Focusing on cognitive laziness and myside bias, I then argue that a more complete reckoning with the implications of interactionism about reasoning will require us to transcend individualism more fully to embrace the selection, design, regulation, and navigation of dialogic environments as central pedagogical aims of critical thinking education. (shrink)

The ability to gain knowledge from text in widely different subject matter areas is key to academic success and lifelong leaming. The process of attaining critical understanding of ideas in text requires a robust repertoire of leaming or study strategies, metacognitive knowledge for regulating their use, and willingness to apply them. Although much is known about the basic design of leaming environments to develop higher-order thinking skills and motivation to learn, educators have, in general, not changed their practices to reflect (...) new knowledge. The lack of procedures that are easy for teachers to administer and provide results that teachers may use in their classrooms for assessment of complex cognitive skill development is a major obstacle to widespread adoption of new approaches. This paper describes a new technology, referred to as HyLighter, and a pedagogically sound implementation of this technology, referred to as the Interaclive Annotation Model. This approach suggests a promising direction for improving the quality of instruction and promoting active reading (i.e., an approach to the development of leaming ability that combines reading with critical thinking and a range of learning-to-Iearn skills) for students in higher education across academic disciplines. (shrink)

We cannot talk about the role of philosophy of education in teachers' training programs without examining the relationship between philosophy and educational theories. Even when theoreticians like Kieran Egan, for example, claim that education is a normative discourse that cannot be inferred from "local" empirical psychological research, the role of philosophy seems of utmost importance because philosophy has essentially to do with norms and values. Another way of looking at the "sciences" of education that renews our comprehension of their relationship (...) is by analysing a new cognitive psychological approach named "metacognition" which rests on one's ability to understand one's own cognitive strategies and mechanisms of regulation. The well-known psychologist Adrien Pinard in Quebec has been working on those concepts lately, inspired by Flavell's model of cognitive regulation. This approach is remarkably similar both to Wilson's definition of procedural criteria which he claims educational theory is all about and to the very specific method of philosophy, that of analytical and reflective thought. Philosophy or reflective thought cannot be separated from practice in teacher training since education is not only a matter of pedagogical means but also of attitudes to and relationship with another person. Thus, besides theory and practice, a third parameter should be taken into account in the elaboration of a teacher training program: the meta-practice and theory parameter, or the reflection on one's own practice, which is essentially philosophical. (shrink)

Traditional memory strategy training interventions improve older adults’ performance on tests of episodic memory, but have limited transfer to episodic memory tasks, let alone to everyday memory. We argue that an alternative approach is needed to assist older adults to compensate for age-related cognitive declines and to maintain functional capacity in their own natural ecologies. We outline a set of principles regarding how interventions can successfully train older adults to increase successful goal pursuit to reduce risks of everyday memory failures. (...) We argue that training individuals to use metacognitive self-regulatory strategies to proactively manage formulation and pursuit of daily goals can compensate for age-related cognitive changes and increase the likelihood of goal attainment. We then describe an intervention approach that instantiates these principles in a multi-modal intervention that is unique in its three-phase approach: individualized assessment of an individual’s current approaches to self-regulation; training memory strategies, self-management skills, and new habits of mind in a group training context; and a behavioral shaping period in which individuals receive coaching and feedback on their efforts to use trained procedures to improve everyday cognition. A recently completed study conducted an initial test of the intervention, with highly encouraging results. We advocate further efforts to replicate, extend, and fine-tune this type of intervention. The ultimate goal is to be able to deliver the intervention in a way that increases its potential reach, including to subpopulations of older adults at risk for everyday cognitive impairments. (shrink)

Feelings of knowing (FoK) are introspective self-report ratings of the felt likelihood that one will be able to recognize a currently unrecallable memory target. Previous studies have shown that FoKs are influenced by retrieved fragment knowledge related to the target, which is compatible with the accessibility hypothesis that FoK is partly based on currently activated partial knowledge about the memory target. However, previous results have been inconsistent as to whether or not FoKs are influenced by the accuracy of such information. (...) In our study ( N = 26), we used a recall-judge-recognize procedure where stimuli were general knowledge questions. The measure of partial knowledge was wider than those applied previously, and FoK was measured before rather than after partial knowledge. The accuracy of reported partial knowledge was positively related to subsequent recognition accuracy, and FoK only predicted recognition on trials where there was correct partial knowledge. Importantly, FoK was positively related to the amount of correct partial knowledge, but did not show a similar incremental relation with incorrect knowledge. (shrink)

In the intellectual confusion prevailing since the demise of Marxism and “marxism”, the attempt is made to define democracy as a matter of pure procedure, explicitly avoiding and condemning any reference to substantive objectives. It can easily be shown, however, that the idea of a purely procedural “democracy” is incoherent and self-contradictory. No legal system whatsoever and no government can exist in the absence of substantive conditions which cannot be left to chance or to the workings of the “market” (...) but must be posited as objectives of political activity. The confusion results from a deficient understanding of what makes a society and an empty idea of “freedom”. The objective of politics is not happiness, an affair to be left to the individuals, but it certainly is liberty understood as participation in the governance of the polity; it is also the pursuit of the common good, defined as the sum of the prerequisites and facilitations of individual autonomy depending on collective action, and as the realization of commonly agreed collective goals. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set (...) of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article. (shrink)

Barsalou's theory of perceptual symbol systems is considered from a metacognitive perspective. Two examples are discussed in terms of the proposed perceptual symbol theory. First, recent results in research on feeling-of-knowing judgement are used to argue for a representation of familiarity with input cues. This representation should support implicit memory. Second, the ability of maintaining a theory of other people's beliefs (theory of mind) is considered and it is suggested that a purely simulation-based view is insufficient to explain the available (...) evidence. Both examples characterize areas where Barsalou's theory would benefit from additional detail. (shrink)

Does metacognition--the capacity to self-evaluate one's cognitive performance--derive from a mindreading capacity, or does it rely on informational processes? Joëlle Proust draws on psychology and neuroscience to defend the second claim. She argues that metacognition need not involve metarepresentations, and is essentially related to mental agency.

According to phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, perceptual experiences can give us immediate justification for beliefs about the external world in virtue of having a distinctive kind of phenomenal character—namely phenomenal force. I present three cases to show that phenomenal force is neither pervasive among nor exclusive to perceptual experiences. The plausibility of such cases calls out for explanation. I argue that contrary to a long-held assumption, phenomenal force is a separate, non-perceptual state generated by some metacognitive mechanisms that monitor one’s (...) first-order mental processes and states. This new account advances our understanding of the nature of phenomenal force. (shrink)

Recent work in cognitive modelling has found that most of the data that has been cited as evidence for the dual-process theory (DPT) of reasoning is best explained by non-linear, “monotonic” one-process models (Stephens et al., 2018, 2019). In this paper, I consider an important caveat of this research: it uses models that are committed to unrealistic assumptions about how effectively task conditions can isolate Type-1 and Type-2 reasoning. To avoid this caveat, I develop a coordinated theoretical, experimental, and modelling (...) strategy to better test DPT. First, I propose that Type-1 and Type-2 reasoning are defined as reasoning that precedes and follows metacognitive control, respectively. Second, I argue that reasoning that precedes and follows metacognitive control can be effectively isolated using debiasing paradigms that manipulate metacognitive heuristics (e.g., processing fluency) to prevent or trigger metacognitive control, respectively. Third, I argue that monotonic modelling can allow us to decisively test DPT only when we use them to analyse data from this particular kind of debiasing paradigm. (shrink)

Computation and Metacognitive skills are essential sub-skills under the domain of Critical Thinking which is a 21 st Century Skill. Having acquired these skills can greatly help students to have a better performance in the Mathematics course. The purpose of this study was to determine whether computation and metacognitive skills are significant predictors of students' performance in Mathematics. Students from four sections of the course Mathematics in the Modern World which was offered during the first semester of the academic year (...) 2018-2019 were selected as the participants of this study which was conducted at Gov. Alfonso D. Tan College, Tangub City, Misamis Occidental, Philippines. The results of this study showed that students' scores in computation and metacognitive test of skills significantly correlate with the students' performance in Mathematics in terms of Grade Point Average (GPA) and a positive direct relationship has been established. Using the Regression Analysis, the result revealed that both computation and metacognitive skills of the students were significant predictors of their performance in Mathematics. These research outcomes affirm that if students acquire these skills, they tend to perform better in Mathematics. This suggests that teachers are encouraged to be more strategic in training the students to acquire and develop computation and metacognitive skills by administering various mathematical problems that encourage students to think critically. (shrink)

What entitles you to rely on information received from others? What entitles you to rely on information retrieved from your own memory? Intuitively, you are entitled simply to trust yourself, while you should monitor others for signs of untrustworthiness. This article makes a case for inverting the intuitive view, arguing that metacognitive monitoring of oneself is fundamental to the reliability of memory, while monitoring of others does not play a significant role in ensuring the reliability of testimony.

Concepts are our tools for thinking. They enable us to engage in explicit reasoning about things in the world. Like physical tools, they can be more or less good, given the ways we use them – more or less dependable for categorisation, learning, induction, action-planning, and so on. Do concept users appreciate, explicitly or implicitly, that concepts vary in dependability? Do they feel that some concepts are in some way defective? If so, we metacognize our concepts. One example that has (...) been studied is a person’s judgement about how well they have learnt a new category. There are many other forms that concept-metacognition could take. This paper offers a preliminary taxonomy of different forms of metacognition directed at concepts. It suggests that concept-metacognition may affect the way one concept from a range of candidates is selected for use, and the way a concept is relied on in reasoning. Concept-metacognition may also play a pivotal role in the social process of constructing concepts, in replacing the old and constructing the new tools for thinking. (shrink)

Real agents rely, when forming their beliefs, on imperfect informational sources (sources which deliver, even under normal conditions of operation, both accurate and inaccurate information). They therefore face the ‘endorsement problem’: how can beliefs produced by endorsing information received from imperfect sources be formed in an epistemically acceptable manner? Focussing on the case of episodic memory and drawing on empirical work on metamemory, this article argues that metacognition likely plays a crucial role in explaining how agents solve the endorsement (...) problem. (shrink)

This study examines the relation of language use to a person’s ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or “inner speech”) impairments. The performance of the PWA was then compared to that of age- and education-matched healthy controls on three kinds of categorization tasks and on metacognitive self-assessments of their performance (...) on those tasks. The PWA showed no deficits in their ability to categorize objects for any of the three trial types (visual, thematic, and categorial). However, on the categorial trials, their metacognitive assessments of whether they had categorized correctly were less reliable than those of the control group. The categorial trials were distinguished from the others by the fact that the categorization could not be based on some immediately perceptible feature or on the objects’ being found together in a type of scenario or setting. This result offers preliminary evidence for a link between covert language use and a specific form of metacognition. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to clarify the relation between epistemic feel- ings, mental action, and self-ascription. Acting mentally and/or thinking about one’s mental states are two possible outcomes of epistemic or metacognitive feelings. Our men- tal actions are often guided by our E-feelings, such as when we check what we just saw based on a feeling of visual uncertainty; but thought about our own perceptual states and capacities can also be triggered by the same E-feelings. The first (...) section of the pa- per presents Dokic’s argument for the insufficiency of the “ascent routine” to account for non-transparent cases of self-ascription, as well as his account of E-feelings. The second section then presents a two-level model of metacognition that builds on Dokic’s account and my own view of the issue. The two-level model links E-feelings to a min- dreading capacity in order to account for non-transparent self-ascriptions. Finally, the third section develops a deeper characterization of the relation among E-feelings, mental action, and self-ascription of mental states based on epistemic rules. In the context of self-knowledge, these remarks suggest the existence of means of forming self-ascriptions other than the ascent routine. (shrink)

This research investigated the metacognitive underpinnings of moral judgment. Participants in two studies were asked to provide quick intuitive responses to moral dilemmas and to indicate their fee...

Alethism is the view that successful remembering only requires an accurate representation of a past event. It opposes the truth-and-authenticity view, according to which successful remembering requires both an accurate representation of a past event and an accurate representation of a past experience of that event. Alethism is able to handle problematic cases faced by the truth-and-authenticity view, but it faces an important challenge of its own: If successful remembering only requires accurately representing past events, then how is it possible (...) that our memories are also experienced as originating in past experiences of those events? I call this the puzzle of alethic memory. I argue that alethism can be reconciled with the claim that memories are experienced as originating in past experiences of those events—what I call the experience of first-handedness—if we conceive of the phenomenology of remembering in metacognitive terms. According to the metacognitive approach that I favor, the phenomenology of remembering is partly explained by what memory represents and partly explained by the existence of a metacognitive feeling that accompanies memory representations. I argue that accounting for the feeling of first-handedness in terms of the metacognitive feeling that accompanies memory representations allows us to solve the puzzle of alethic memory. (shrink)

Metacognition is associated with planning, monitoring, evaluating and repairing performance Designers of elearning systems can improve the quality of their environments by explicitly structuring the visual and interactive display of learning contexts to facilitate metacognition. Typically page layout, navigational appearance, visual and interactivity design are not viewed as major factors in metacognition. This is because metacognition tends to be interpreted as a process in the head, rather than an interactive one. It is argued here, that cognition (...) and metacognition are part of a continuum and that both are highly interactive. The tenets of this view are explained by reviewing some of the core assumptions of the situated and distribute approach to cognition and then further elaborated by exploring the notions of active vision, visual complexity, affordance landscape and cue structure. The way visual cues are structured and the way interaction is designed can make an important difference in the ease and effectiveness of cognition and metacognition. Documents that make effective use of markers such as headings, callouts, italics can improve students’ ability to comprehend documents and ‘plan’ the way they review and process content. Interaction can be designed to improve ‘the proximal zone of planning’ – the look ahead and apprehension of what is nearby in activity space that facilitates decisions. This final concept is elaborated in a discussion of how e-newspapers combine effective visual and interactive design to enhance user control over their reading experience. (shrink)