Do we run away because we are frightened, or are we frightened because we run away? The authors address this issue with respect to the relation between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control. When self-regulation is goal driven, monitoring affects control processes so that increased processing effort should enhance feelings of competence and feelings of knowing. In contrast, when self-regulation is data driven, such feelings may be based themselves on the feedback from control processes, in which case they should decrease with increasing effort. Evidence for both monitoring-based control and control-based monitoring occurring even in the same situation is presented. The results are discussed with regard to the issue of the cause-and-effect relation between subjective experience and behavior.Keywords: metacognition, subjective experience, monitoring, control, judgments of learning A long-standing issue in psychology and philosophy concerns the cause-and-effect relation between phenomenal experience and behavior (Baars, 1988;Bargh, 1997;Bless & Forgas, 2000;Flanagan, 1992;Mandler, 2002;Marcel, 1983aMarcel, , 1983b Marcel & Bisiach, 1988). Whereas many discussions in cognitive psychology assume that subjective experience can play a causal role in influencing behavior, recent findings lend credence to the idea that subjective experience may be based on the feedback from one's own behavior and thus follow rather than precede behavior. Indeed, in reviewing their own work, Kelley and Jacoby (1998) praised the insight owed to the James-Lange view of emotion, according to which "subjective experience can involve an attribution or unconscious inference about effects on performance and so follow from, rather than be responsible for, objective performance" (pp. 127-128). In this article we address the causal links between subjective experience and behavior within a restricted domain-that of metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control. We believe that our analysis and results can provide some insight into the general issue of the relation between subjective experience and behavior.The Cause-and-Effect Relation Between Subjective Experience and BehaviorMost of the discussions of the status of subjective experience in human behavior have centered on the causal role that consciousness might play in guiding behavior (Schwarz & Clore, 1996). The issue that has been addressed concerns the extent to which phenomenal consciousness affects behavior, in general, and "rational" action, in particular. In Posner and Snyder's (1975) conceptual framework, for example, controlled processes, as opposed to automatic processes, were seen to characterize conscious functioning. Block (1995) associated consciousness with the reflective pursuit of one's goals, arguing that without consciousness one loses the "rational control of action." In Schacter's (1989) model, the conscious system is assumed to function as the gateway to an executive control system that initiates and regulates voluntary action. Only activations that gain ac...

When participants studied a list of paired associates for several study-test cycles, their judgments of learning (JOLs) exhibited relatively good calibration on the 1st cycle, with a slight overconfidence. However, a shift toward marked underconfidence occurred from the 2nd cycle on. This underconfidence-with-practice (UWP) effect was very robust across several experimental manipulations, such as feedback or no feedback regarding the correctness of the answer, self-paced versus fixed-rate presentation, different incentives for correct performance, magnitude and direction of associative relationships, and conditions producing different degrees of knowing. It was also observed both in item-by-item JOLs and in aggregate JOLs. The UWP effect also occurred for list learning and for the memory of action events. Several theoretical explanations for this counterintuitive effect are discussed.

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Judgments of learning (JOLs) underestimate the increase in recall that occurs with repeated study (the underconfidence-with-practice effect; UWP). The authors explore an account in terms of a foresight bias in which JOLs are inflated when the to-be-recalled target highlights aspects of the cue that are not transparent when the cue appears alone and the tendency of practice to alleviate bias by providing learners with cues pertinent to recall. In 3 experiments the UWP effect was strongest for items that induce a foresight bias, but delaying JOLs reduced the debiasing effects of practice, thereby moderating the UWP effect. This occurred when delayed JOLs were prompted by the cue alone (like during testing), not when prompted by the cue-target pair (like during study).