Metacognition is knowledge that can be expressed as confidence judgments about what one knows (monitoring) and by strategies for learning what one does not know (control). Although there is a substantial literature on cognitive processes in animals, little is known about their metacognitive abilities. Here we show that rhesus macaques, trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on perceptual tasks, transferred that ability immediately to a new perceptual task and to a working memory task. We also show that monkeys can learn to request "hints" when they are given problems that they would otherwise have to solve by trial and error. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that nonhuman primates share with humans the ability to monitor and transfer their metacognitive ability both within and between different cognitive tasks, and to seek new knowledge on a need-to-know basis.
The issue of how people use their metacognitive judgments about what they know and how well they know it to take control over their own learning is of primary concern in this article. The fact that in many situations people have relatively accurate metacognitions is well documented (Brown, 1978;, 1997 Gnmeberg & Monks, 1974; Jacoby, Bjork, & Kelley, 1993;Johnson, 1988;Johnson & Raye, 1981;King, Zechmeister, & Shaughnessy, 1980;Koriat, 1975Koriat, , 1993Koriat, , 1995Koriat, , 1997Koriat, , 1998Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996, 1998Leonesio & Nelson, 1990;Lovelace, 1984; Mazzoni, Cornoldi, Tomat, & Vecchi, 1997;Mazzoni & Nelson, 1995;Metcalfe, 1986aMetcalfe, , 1986b Metcalfe, Schwartz, & Joaqnim, 1993;Metcalfe & Weibe, 1987;Nelson, 1988;Nelson & Dunlosky, 1991Nelson, Leonesio, Landwehr, & Narens, 1986;Schwartz & Metcalfe, 1994;Schwartz & Smith, 1997;Smith, Brown, & Balfour, 1991;Thiede & Dunlosky, 1994; Vesonder & Voss, 1985; Wldner & Smith, 1996;Widner, Smith, & Graziano, 1996). Ease-of-learning judgments (EeLs; Underwood, 1966), feeling-of-knowing judgments (FIGs;Hart, 1965;Nelson, Leonesio, Shimamura, Landwehr, & Narens, 1982), and judgments of difficulty (JODs) or of learning (JOLs; Arbuckle & Cuddy, 1969;Gardiner & Klee, 1976;Groninger, 1979;King et al., 1980;Lovelace, 1984) generally have been shown to predict subsequent memory performance with above-chance accuracy. Having established that Lisa K. Son and Janet Metcalfe, Department of Psychology, Columbia University.This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 48066. We would like to thank Ozlem Ayduk, Brady Butterfield, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Jasia Pietrzak, and Lisa Schwartz for their help. We also appreciate the comments of Thomas O. Nelson, Keith Thiede, and an anonymous reviewer on a draft of this article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lisa K. Son, Department of Psychology, 406 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027. Electronic mail may be sent to son@psych.columbia.edu. people appear to have access to accurate metalmowledge, the question of how they put that knowledge to use is becoming focal.Some theories indicate that metacognitions play a central role in a variety of cognitive tasks, including memory retrieval (Reder, 1987;Reder & Ritter, 1992), initial memory encoding (Metcalfe, 1993), problem solving (Metcalfe, 1986b;Simon & Newell, 1971), and self-directed learning . As was assumed by early researchers such as Flavell (1979) and Flavell and Wellman (1977), these self-reflective processes are crucial in controlling and guiding human cognition (see Metcalfe, 1996, in press, for review). Recently, investigators have begun intensively and systematically to explore the question of primary interest in this article: How do people use these metacognitive judgments to control their study-time allocation and hence to determine what it is that they will learn?Interest in the control functions of people's metacognitions was fostered by a framework for human metacognition forw...
This article investigated individual control of spacing strategies during study. Three predictions were outlined: The spacing hypothesis suggests that people choose to space their study to improve long-term learning via the spacing effect. The massing hypothesis suggests that people choose to mass their study because of illusions of confidence during study. The metacognitive hypothesis suggests that people control their spacing schedules as a function of their metacognitive judgments of specific to-be-learned items. To test these hypotheses, the authors asked participants to study and make judgments of learning for cue-target pairs. Then, participants were given three choices; they could study the pair again immediately (massed), study the pair again after the entire list had been presented (spaced), or choose not to restudy (done). Results supported a metacognitively controlled spacing strategy-people spaced items that were judged to be relatively easy but massed items that were judged as relatively difficult.Students seem to have an immensely difficult time avoiding cramming. In the psychological literature, cramming has been better known as massing, in which the learner studies a particular to-be-learned item for a certain period of time with short rest periods, or lags, between study trials. By contrast, studying the to-be-learned item over several repetitions with longer lags between them has been known as spacing. It has been found extensively that spacing leads to higher performance than does massing, particularly under conditions in which the delay between study and test is long rather than short (Bahrick, Bahrick, Bahrick, & Bahrick, 1993;Bahrick & Phelps, 1987;Cahill & Toppino, 1993;Dempster, 1987Dempster, , 1988Glenberg, 1976Glenberg, , 1977Glenberg, , 1979Glenberg & Lehmann, 1980;Glover & Corkill, 1987;Hintzman, 1974;Jensen & Freund, 1981;Melton, 1970;Rea & Modigliani, 1987;Shaughnessy, Zimmerman, & Underwood, 1972;Toppino, 1991Toppino, , 1993Underwood, 1970;Zechmeister & Shaughnessy, 1980). This classic spacing effect was first discovered by Ebbinghaus, who used himself as a subject (Ebbinghaus, 1885), and has received wide attention over the past 30 years or so in the laboratory. But surprisingly, in all of the published studies, the lags between the study trials were controlled by the experimenters rather than by the participants themselves. An issue that has scarcely been mentioned in the spacing literature is the extent to which one has control over one's spacing strategies. Glenberg (1977) proposed that organizational strategies might contribute to how an individual might space his or her study. Zechmeister and Shaughnessy (1980) suggested that participants might allocate their study resources in accordance with metamemory judgments about how well items are learned. However, control of spacing has not been investigated above and beyond these suggestions. The question of interest here was to consider and test how people might control their spacing using a metacognitively controlled strategy for ...
Students have to make scores of practical decisions when they study. We investigated the effectiveness of, and beliefs underlying, one such practical decision: the decision to test oneself while studying. Using a flashcards-like procedure, participants studied lists of word pairs. On the second of two study trials, participants either saw the entire pair again (pair mode) or saw the cue and attempted to generate the target (test mode). Participants were asked either to rate the effectiveness of each study mode (Experiment 1) or to choose between the two modes (Experiment 2). The results demonstrated a mismatch between metacognitive beliefs and study choices: Participants (incorrectly) judged that the pair mode resulted in the most learning, but chose the test mode most frequently. A post-experimental questionnaire suggested that self-testing was motivated by a desire to diagnose learning rather than a desire to improve learning.
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