Do you ever think about how you think or have particular thoughts about your thoughts? This ability to think about yourself is called metacognition. Keep reading to discover more about this fascinating aspect of the human mind.
Last update: 21 April, 2019
Although the term metacognition is complex, you could summarize it as knowledge of knowledge itself. In other words, the ability to know and regulate how you think and what the conscious control of cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and understanding encompasses.
The study of metacognition began with epistemologist and cognitive psychologist J. Flavell and English anthropologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson. The latter focused his research on metacognition in animals.
Metacognition is higher-level thinking in which you’re the object in question. That’s where the prefix “meta” comes from. Metacognition allows you to evaluate executive processes and make changes to improve.
Let’s take a look at a couple of examples that make it easier to understand. Let’s say you’re reading something and suddenly stop to ask yourself if you understood what you read. You realize that you didn’t, so you read it again. That’s metacognition. Another example is when you’re trying to solve a problem and realize that the mental strategy you’re using isn’t working, so you switch to another.
One important thing to understand about metacognition is that it’s a multi-faceted concept. You can discuss metacognition from different perspectives. One way is to understand it from the content of the metacognition and the other from the perspective of the metacognitive process.
Consequently, there’s a difference between metacognition as metacognitive knowledge and metacognition as metacognitive control. Next, we’ll explain these two perspectives and what they mean.
This term refers to what people know about their own cognitive processes and those of other people. This perspective refers to the aspects of the content or knowledge. It’s declarative knowledge that you practice when you think about your intellectual capacity, learning abilities, or memory.
This type of knowledge has the following characteristics:
Metacognitive knowledge is made up of three components:
Metacognitive control refers to the active supervision and consequent regulation and organization based on the processes that act in a given moment. In other words, it refers to the ability to be attentive to possible failures and act accordingly to reduce them. It’s important to understand that the cognitive process plays a role before, during, and after the task in question.
Metacognitive control has the following characteristics:
Metacognition is a crucial part of information processing. In fact, you can observe that metacognition plays a role in most of the tasks you carry out.
You also have to understand that there’s a very fine line between cognition and metacognition, which makes it seem like it’s two dimensions of the same thing rather than static categories.
Researching more on metacognition will help us understand human thinking and reasoning better, which is highly important in many fields (such as education). This is because understanding how the human mind works will help us improve.
This text is provided for informational purposes only and does not replace consultation with a professional. If in doubt, consult your specialist.