Online research in philosophy

Smith et al. demonstrate the viability of animal metacognition research. We commend their effort and suggest three avenues of research. The first concerns whether animals are explicitly aware of their metacognitive processes. The second asks whether animals have metaknowledge of their own uncertain responses. The third issue concerns the monitoring/control distinction. We suggest some ways in which these issues elucidate metacognitive processes in nonhuman animals.

Smith et al. present a model that they suggest may clarify aspects of the phylogenetic distribution of metacognition, based on observation of what they call uncertainty monitoring. Although they suggest that their model is supported by data collected using monkeys and dolphins, their interpretation that nonhuman animal behaviors parallel thought processes in humans may be unwarranted. The model presented by Smith et al. is inconsistent with current theories and empirical findings on the comparative aspects of metacognition. We present three oversights of the model and extend our critique to include a brief discussion of animal self-awareness, as well as current neuropsychological perspectives on metacognitive processing in humans.

The study of metacognition can shed light on some fundamental issues about consciousness and its role in behavior. Metacognition research concerns the processes by which people self reflect on their own cognitive and memory processes (monitoring), and how they put their metaknowledge to use in regulating their information processing and behavior (control). Experimental research on metacognition has addressed the following questions: First, what are the bases of metacognitive judgments that people make in monitoring their learning, remembering, and performance? Second, how valid are such judgments and what are the factors that affect the correspondence between subjective and objective indexes of knowing? Third, what are the processes that underlie the accuracy and inaccuracy of metacognitive judgments? Fourth, how does the output of metacognitive monitoring contribute to the strategic regulation of learning and remembering? Finally, how do the metacognitive processes of monitoring and control affect actual performance? Research addressing these questions is reviewed, emphasizing its implication for issues concerning consciousness, in particular, the genesis of subjective experience, the function of self-reflective consciousness, and the cause-and-effect relation between subjective experience and behavior.

Researchers have begun to explore animals' capacities for uncertainty monitoring and metacognition. This exploration could extend the study of animal self-awareness and establish the relationship of self-awareness to other-awareness. It could sharpen descriptions of metacognition in the human literature and suggest the earliest roots of metacognition in human development. We summarize research on uncertainty monitoring by humans, monkeys, and a dolphin within perceptual and metamemory tasks. We extend phylogenetically the search for metacognitive capacities by considering studies that have tested less cognitively sophisticated species. By using the same uncertainty-monitoring paradigms across species, it should be possible to map the phylogenetic distribution of metacognition and illuminate the emergence of mind. We provide a unifying formal description of animals' performances and examine the optimality of their decisional strategies. Finally, we interpret animals' and humans' nearly identical performances psychologically. Low-level, stimulus-based accounts cannot explain the phenomena. The results suggest granting animals a higher-level decision-making process that involves criterion setting using controlled cognitive processes. This conclusion raises the difficult question of animal consciousness. The results show that animals have functional features of or parallels to human conscious cognition. Remaining questions are whether animals also have the phenomenal features that are the feeling/knowing states of human conscious cognition, and whether the present paradigms can be extended to demonstrate that they do. Thus, the comparative study of metacognition potentially grounds the systematic study of animal consciousness. Key Words: cognition; comparative cognition; consciousness; memory monitoring; metacognition; metamemory; self-awareness; uncertainty; uncertainty monitoring.

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.

The author claims that concept possession is not only necessary but also sufficient for self-consciousness, where self-consciousness is understood as the awareness of oneself as a self. Further, he links concept possession to intelligent behavior. His ultimate aim is to provide a framework for the study of self-consciousness in infants and non-human animals. I argue that the claim that all concepts are necessarily related to the self-concept remains unconvincing and suggest that what might be at issue here are not so much conceptual but rather metacognitive abilities.

Metacognition refers to any knowledge or cognitive process that monitors or controls cognition. We highlight similarities between metacognitive and executive control functions, and ask how these processes might be implemented in the human brain. A review of brain imaging studies reveals a circuitry of attentional networks involved in these control processes, with its source located in midfrontal areas. These areas are active during conflict resolution, error correction, and emotional regulation. A developmental approach to the organization of the anatomy involved in executive control provides an added perspective on how these mechanisms are influenced by maturation and learning, and how they relate to metacognitive activity.

It is tempting to assume that metacognitive processes necessarily evoke awareness. We review a number of experiments in which cognitive schema have been shown to develop without awareness. Implicit learning of a novel schema may not involve metacognitive regulation per se. Substitution of one automatic process by another as a result of the inadequacy of the former as circumstances change does, however, clearly involve metacognitive and executive processes of error correction and schema selection. We describe a recently published study in which we serendipitously discovered that a blindsight subject could change the schema with which he processed cue information in orienting spatial attention task without reporting any awareness of this change, or of the cues and targets which respectively directed and were the object his attention.

The relationship between metacognition and executive control is explored. According to an analysis by Fernandez-Duque, Baird, and Posner (this issue), metacognitive regulation involves attention, conflict resolution, error correction, inhibitory control, and emotional regulation. These aspects of metacognition are presumed to be mediated by a neural circuit involving midfrontal brain regions. An evaluation of the proposal by Fernandez-Duque et al. is made, and it is suggested that there is considerable convergence of issues associated with metacognition, executive control, working memory, and frontal lobe function. By integrating these domains and issues, significant progress could be made toward a cognitive neuroscience of metacognition.