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Metacognition is usually construed as a conscious, intentional process whereby people reflect upon their own mental activity. Here, we instead suggest that metacognition is but an instance of a larger class of representational re-description processes that we assume occur unconsciously and automatically. From this perspective, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to anticipate the consequences of action or activity on itself, on the world and on other people through three predictive loops: an inner loop, a perception -action loop and a self -other (social cognition) loop, which together form a tangled hierarchy. We ask what kinds of mechanisms may subtend this form of enactive metacognition. We extend previous neural network simulations and compare the model with signal detection theory, highlighting that while the latter approach assumes that both type I (objective) and type II (subjective, metacognition-based) decisions tap into the same signal at different hierarchical levels, our approach is closer to dual-route models in which it is assumed that the re-descriptions made possible by the emergence of meta-representations occur independently and outside of the firstorder causal chain. We close by reviewing relevant neurological evidence for the idea that awareness, self-awareness and social cognition involve the same mechanisms.

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In sequence learning tasks, participants' sensitivity to the sequential structure of a series of events often overshoots their ability to express relevant knowledge intentionally, as in generation tasks that require participants to produce either the next element of a sequence (inclusion) or a different element (exclusion). Comparing generation performance under inclusion and exclusion conditions makes it possible to assess the respective influences of conscious and unconscious learning. Recently, two main concerns have been expressed concerning such tasks. First, it is often difficult to design control sequences in such a way that they enable clear comparisons with the training material. Second, it is challenging to ask participants to perform appropriately under exclusion instructions, for the requirement to exclude familiar responses often leads them to adopt degenerate strategies (e.g., pushing on the same key all the time), which then need to be specifically singled out as invalid. To overcome both concerns, we introduce reversible second-order conditional (RSOC) sequences and show (a) that they elicit particularly strong transfer effects, (b) that dissociation of implicit and explicit influences becomes possible thanks to the removal of salient transitions in RSOCs, and