Individual differences in metacognition: Evidence against a general metacognitive ability

Abstract

Individual differences in metacognitive accuracy are generally thought to reflect differences in metacognitive ability. If so, memory monitoring performance should be consistent across different metacognitive tasks and show high test-retest reliability. Two experiments examined these possibilities, using four common metacognitive tasks: ease of learning judgments, feeling of knowing judgments, judgments of learning, and text comprehension monitoring. Alternate-forms correlations were computed for metacognitive accuracy (with a l-week interval between tests). Although individual differences in memory and confidence were stable across both sessions and tasks, differences in metacognitive accuracy were not. These results pose considerable practical and theoretical challenges for metacognitive researchers.The nature of memory monitoring processes has been studied with increasing interest. Most investigations focus on metacognitive accuracy, the relationship between metacognition and future memory performance. There is now a broad base ofempirical observations confirming the accuracy of such judgments, with a wide variety of tasks (see Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994;Nelson, 1992;Reder, 1996). Investigators in the field have begun to move toward a synthesis ofthese findings; indeed, several theoretical accounts of metacognitive performance have been proposed

Framing effects on metacognitive monitoring and control

“…It may be that successful learners are better at making metacognitive predictions, but the demonstrated link between monitoring accuracy and test performance has been mixed. Several studies have shown a positive correlation between metacognitive ability and test performance (Bisanz, Vesonder, & Voss, 1978;Maki & Berry, 1984;Yan, 1994), whereas others have shown that learning ability is not related to metacognitive accuracy (Kearney & Zechmeister, 1989;Kelemen, Frost, & Weaver, 2000;Lovelace, 1984;Maki & Swett, 1987;Underwood, 1966). The present results support the proposal that lower confidence may change how people evaluate and plan their study, which may play an important role in later test accuracy.…”

The Neural Basis of Metacognitive Ability

“…Given the interdependence of metacognition and performance discussed above, one explanation for this null result might be methodological in nature, as a performance-confidence relationship is naturally harder to quantify than performance itself. A similar line of thought led Keleman et al to speculate that 'stable metacognitive performance might be detected using very large numbers of trials' [112]. In support of this view, Fleming et al showed good split-half reliability (r ¼ 0.69) in a perceptual decision task with hundreds of trials [21], and metacognitive accuracy has been shown to be stable across two perceptual tasks (r ¼ 0.71), despite performance itself being uncorrelated (r ¼ 0.05; figure 3) [70].…”

Metacognition, metamemory, and mindreading in high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder.

“…Judgments of learning involve assessing how well one thinks one has learnt a piece of information, and judgements of confidence involve making retrospective judgments about how certain one is in one's knowledge about a piece of information. The literature on typical development suggests that metamemory accuracy is only modestly correlated across different types of metamemory judgement (Kelemen, et al, 2000;Leonesio & Nelson, 1990). This has led to suggestions that different metamemory judgments may be based on different sources of information.…”