International Association for Metacognition

Glimpses of Genius: A Journey Through Meta-Metcalfe Land

Lisa Son, Barnard College

How would you define genius? Many would call it an innate ability, citing examples of genius, like Mozart or Einstein. And others will say that genius is demonstrated through one final product, for instance, a piece of artwork or a mathematical proof. In my talk, I shift the focus of genius from the final product to the processes that led to those products: Glimpses. Furthermore, I will propose that the real genius is the glimpse giver, the individual who knows how to provide the optimal amount of information that is likely to give rise to curiosity, imagination, and appreciation.

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A Familiarity-Driven Feeling that Something Just Happened

Anne Cleary, Sarah N. Horne, Colorado State University

This research reflects a long line of research in my lab that has been inspired by Janet Metcalfe's research. It most closely relates to Janet's work on how metacognitive feelings of closeness such as those involved in tip-of-the-tongue states influence curiosity and information-seeking (e.g., Metcalfe, J., Schwartz, B. L., & Bloom, P. A. (2017). The tip-of-the-tongue state and curiosity. Cognitive research: principles and implications, 2(1), 31.). This abstract reports on a new study out of my lab that investigates the notion of metacognitive feelings of closeness and identifies a new cognitive bias that seems to possibly reflect a feeling of closeness.

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A Feeling for Knowledge

Mariona Miyata-Sturm, University of Glasgow

Epistemic feelings, such as the feelings of error, confidence, curiosity, or knowing, play a large role in knowledge acquisition. Curiosity, for example, motivates our search for knowledge and feelings of error and confidence signal whether the search is successful, allowing us to change strategy if needed. It is therefore surprising that philosophers for the most part have overlooked these feelings when theorising about knowledge. Here I go some way towards bridging philosophical work on knowledge and empirical work on epistemic feelings. I argue that these feelings play a role both in theoretical and practical knowledge, from guiding us to learn new facts or skills to evaluating whether an act is apt or an assertion accurate, and show how they fit into a prominent reliabilist account of knowledge.

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The Effects of Learner Control on Knowledge and Skill Acquisition: A Meta-Analytic Review

Hannah Hausman, Chloe McGuire, University of California Santa Cruz

In the context of self-regulated learning (SRL), learner-control refers to the ability to independently decide how to approach learning new information, customizing features such as pacing, order, or strategy. The effects of learner-control compared to experimenter-control on knowledge and skill acquisition remain unclear, with mixed findings reported across domains and instructional contexts. The current study presents a systematic review and meta-analysis exploring how learner-controlled, self-regulated learning conditions affect learning outcomes. The review synthesizes empirical studies in which learners exercised control over aspects such as pace, order, or strategy in the acquisition of novel content, with learning assessed through measures of memory and comprehension (e.g., recall, recognition, transfer, etc). The pooled effect size demonstrated a moderate, positive effect of control over learning. Moderator analyses showed larger benefits for motor learning, as well as control over type of feedback and strategy. However, inconsistency in how learner control is studied in different domains makes it difficult to hypothesize about underlying mechanisms. The results are discussed in terms of theories of the connection between accurate metacognitive monitoring and control. Gaps in this literature are highlighted as well, and future research directions are proposed.

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Order Effects in Study Decisions: The Role of Anchoring in Learning Predictions

Yoonhee Jang, University of Montana

How does the order of study items affect how we judge our own learning? While prior research shows that arranging test questions from easy to hard leads to higher overall performance evaluations, this study extends this phenomenon to future-oriented metacognitive judgments, such as predicting future performance and making ease-of-study decisions. Across 10-question study blocks, participants were more sensitive to increasing difficulty than to decreasing difficulty, a pattern that was especially pronounced when deciding how difficult a question felt during study. In contrast to previous findings, question order did not alter participants' retrospective evaluations of their test scores. These results suggest that early experiences act as psychological anchors during study, highlighting similarities and distinctions between how we predict future learning versus how we evaluate past performance.

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Comparing Aha! Moments in Problem Solving and Generative Ideation

Visheeta Chandolia, Matthew Kidd, Morgan Paladino, Texas A&M University

Responses that come to mind as aha! moments occur suddenly, rapidly, and without deliberate intention. Aha! moments are typically associated with insight, the sudden realization of a problem’s solution, and have recently been reported in generative tasks, including divergent thinking and category generation. The present experiment compared the frequency and strength of aha! moments for responses in verbal problem solving (Compound Remote Associates and Polysemous Associates Test problems) with responses in ad hoc and taxonomic category generation. Comparisons were made using a two-step procedure in which each response was first reported as an aha! or non-aha! response, and, for aha! responses, rated in subjective strength. No difference in aha! strength was found between problem solutions and category responses, regardless of which task was given first, nor did aha! strength differ between ad hoc and taxonomic category members. In generative tasks, aha! strength, pre-response pause time, and response novelty increased over time during generation. Although fewer responses occurred over time, later responses were increasingly likely to be aha! responses. These results support the use of aha! reports during idea generation and link such reports to retrieval dynamics seen in many generative tasks, including divergent thinking.

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Meta-Metacognition: Judgments about Metacognition

Bennett Schwartz, Florida International University; Tina Sundelin, Andreas Jemstedt, Stockholm University

Meta-metacognition is the awareness of our own metacognition. We refer to meta-metacognitive judgments as third-order judgments in which the judgement is about evaluating the accuracy of a metacognitive judgment (second order), which, in turn, is a prediction about the success or failure of the outcome of a cognitive process (first order). Although meta-metacognition is a seldom studied topic, there are an adequate sample of papers to claim that people can make accurate third-order judgments with respect to both prospective and retrospective metacognition. In this talk, we review the literature with a particular focus on the effectiveness of the various methods employed to study meta-metacognition. This includes methods which directly ask participants to make meta-metacognitive judgments, by assessing the accuracy of their metacognitive judgments, and it includes methods that infer meta-metacognition from control decisions about whether to maintain or withhold an answer. Because meta-metacognition is a judgment about metacognition, there is reason to suspect that, like metacognition itself, meta-metacognitive judgments arise from heuristic processes.

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Leveraging Janet Metcalfe’s Research to Improve Academic Outcomes for Medical Students

Michael J. Serra, Eevin Jennings, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, School of Medicine

Research on metacognition and self-regulated learning provides a robust framework for supporting a variety of learners. Medical students constitute a unique group, as many achieve success in their undergraduate studies without developing effective study strategies. Consequently, some enter medical school with inefficient approaches and maladaptive beliefs about learning, including fixed mindsets or error avoidance, which may impede their ability to meet the complex demands of medical training. As Medical Education Learning Specialists, we implement findings from cognitive psychology through workshops and individualized academic coaching to support these students. In this presentation, we will describe how Janet Metcalfe’s research informs these practices. For example, the Region of Proximal Learning (RPL) framework helps students determine what to study and how much effort to invest, a process that is especially critical during licensing-exam preparation, when time and effort must be allocated strategically across extensive content. Her work on hypercorrection and learning from errors similarly informs students’ effective review of their assessments and practice questions, particularly those who tend to avoid errors or struggle to learn from them. In addition, we will present a recent study examining medical students’ predictions of their performance on practice licensing exams, revealing several common metacognitive biases and the use of a form of the Memory-for-Past-Test (MPT) heuristic to improve their accuracy. These examples illustrate how foundational studies in cognitive psychology and metacognition, particularly findings from Metcalfe’s research program, have contributed to the development of a practical toolkit to improve medical students’ academic achievement.

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Judgments of Earning: Applying Metcalfe’s High Return Metacognitive Theories to Self-Serving Agency and Overconfidence in Financial Markets

Bridgid Finn, Fidelity Investments

Financial markets present a fundamental attribution problem: successful and unsuccessful outcomes often reflect a combination of skill, luck, and uncontrollable market forces. Active traders are continually presented with feedback on their performance. Yet, they often overestimate their ability to pick what and when to trade, and over time earn lower returns than less active investors (e.g. Barber & Odean, 2000; 2001). Building on Metcalfe and colleagues' work on the metacognition of agency, I will discuss how overconfidence among traders may emerge, in part, from biased judgments about personal agency. Metcalfe and collaborators research demonstrates that people can accurately monitor the extent to which their actions caused events by integrating cues about actions, outcomes, and perceived control (e.g., Metcalfe & Greene, 2007). It follows that accurate agency judgments should improve learning by allowing people to correctly identify which outcomes are diagnostic of their own competence and which are not.  In financial contexts agency judgments can become systematically distorted. Active traders are susceptible to a ‘self-serving bias’, in which they attribute gains to their skills and losses to external factors like market conditions or chance. (e.g., Daniel & Hirshleifer, 2015). This self-serving pattern creates an asymmetry in learning from experience, in which gains become evidence of knowledge, but losses are not used to update diagnostics about one’s abilities. These patterns may reflect a metacognitive process in which biased agency attributions inflate beliefs about expertise, and the externalization of negative outcomes weakens the effect of corrective feedback. The discussion will offer a novel theoretical bridge between agency, self-serving bias, and overconfidence, and learning.