Quotes About Metacognition

Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

Two Dimensions of Executive Skills: Thinking and Doing Executive skills involving thinking (cognition) Working memory Planning/prioritization Organization Time management Metacognition Executive skills involving doing (behavior) Response inhibition Emotional control Sustained attention Task initiation Goal-directed persistence Flexibility

"Thinking about thinking" has to be a principle ingredient of any empowering practice of education.

Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you're thinking in order to make your thinking better.

I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it's my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it?

For example, dissonance occurs in non-human animals (e.g., Egan, Bloom, et al., 2010; Egan, Santos, et al., 2007), suggesting that the metacognitive structure of self is not necessary.

It is naturally difficult, if one denies the existence of the second theatre, to elucidate what is meant by describing the episodes which are supposed to take place in it as self-intimating. But some points are clear enough. It is not supposed that when I am wondering, say, what is the answer to a puzzle and am ipso facto consciously doing so, that I am synchronously performing two acts of attention, one to the puzzle and the other to my wondering about it.

As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called "metacognition." This is the ability to know when you're not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you're doing, and then realizing that you're doing it wrong.

The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don't know much about a subject do not know when they're in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they're failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry. Even

the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called "metacognition.

Psychologists use the rather ponderous term metacognition to refer to an awareness of thought process, and metamood to mean awareness of one's own emotions. I prefer the term self-awareness, in the sense of an ongoing attention to one's internal states.

In particular, judging one's own confidence in having seen or heard something—metacognition, or "knowing about knowing" (recall the four-point confidence scale in chapter 2)—is linked to anterior regions of prefrontal cortex.

So if we think about ourselves with respect to the game, we're thinking about our thinking. And we decided the one thing we couldn't think about was our thinking, because the object has to be Other. We can think only the things that can't think themselves. So if we think ourselves, see for instance conceiving ourselves as thought, we can't ourselves be the object of our thinking.

we can use self-observation to keep cognitive dissonance in check. To some degree, we can compensate for it by: (1) knowing it exists; (2) knowing what our bias is likely to be; and (3) applying metacognition—the "What am I not thinking about?" question. Be as detached as you can be, as if you were asked to debate both sides of the issue.

This presumption by the professor that her students will readily follow something complex that appears fundamental in her own mind is a metacognitive error, a misjudgment of the matchup between what she knows and what her students know.

The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don't know is critical for decision making.

L. L. Jacoby, C. N. Wahlheim, & J. H. Coane, Test-enhanced learning of natural concepts: effects on recognition memory, classification, and metacognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 36 (2010), 1441