Metacognition is cognition about one's own cognition. Its function is to control and monitor current mental activity. Examples of metacognition include : judging the adequacy of a particular response and correcting it when necessary (retrospective monitoring), evaluating one's ability to carry out a new task (prospective monitoring), the difficulty of items to be learnt (ease of learning judgments), or the past acquisition of a given memory (feeling of knowing judgments). Attending and planning respectively aim to form a clearer picture of some object, property or context, and to make better use of its potential resources. Other facets of metacognition are the control of motivation, of emotion, and of the social impact of informational and motivational states. If the function of metacognition is to modulate the way in which information is used in a representational system, the question arises of how it relates to mind-reading and self-awareness. Some of the questions to be discussed include the following :
1) Does metacognitive control over one’s — or others’ — mind involve reasoning with mental concepts? More generally, does metacognition depend on metarepresentation ? Or reciprocally: does metarepresentation presuppose metacognition? If the two sets of capacities are distinct, how are they phylogenetically related?
2) How does metacognition contribute to self-awareness? How can the form of reflexivity present in metacognition be characterized? What are the respective contributions of metacognitive activity and of mindreading in the consciousness of being oneself ? Through which steps can an implicit, practical recognition by an agent of having a mind turn into the sense of being a self?
3) What is the function, in metacognition, of first-person feeling and experience? How far does an individual’s metacognitive capacity help her to evaluate someone else’s performance? If such a transfer is at all possible, how can it be explained?
These various problems will be approached by confronting arguments and evidence from cognitive ethology, evolutionary psychology, developmental and experimental psychology, cognitive anthropology and philosophy.
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