Metamemory: An Update of Critical Findings

Metamemory refers to our knowledge and awareness of our own memory content and processes. For example, when a person asserts that he or she is good at remembering maps and directions, but poor at remembering faces, that person is making a statement concerning metamemory knowledge, at a global level. Similarly, when he/she says that he/she is better than most people at remembering facts, he/she is operating at a global level. If this is, in fact, true, we say he/she exhibits global accuracy. When he/she claims that it is highly likely that he/she will remember a particular fact or event, but may forget another event, he/she is making a metamemory judgment at the level of particular itemsdevaluating his/her relative strength in memory. If he/she is correct, we call this latter kind of metamemory “relative accuracy” or, sometimes, “resolution,” and in principle, it is distinct from global accuracy. A person may not know that he/she has an extraordinarily good memorydbetter than that of other people, and hence might show little or no metacognitive awareness at a global level. He/she might also not know how well he/she did on a test, showing overall overor underconfidenceda different kind of global metacognitive judgment. At the same time, he/she could know perfectly well which items will be remembered and which are likely to be forgotten, and hence have excellent metamemory at a relative accuracy level. These global and relative level flavors of metacognition are often conflated, but in principle they are distinct. For instance, it is frequently claimed that people have poor emotional metacognition. This is true at the global level: people usually do not know whether they are more emotionally sensitive and perceptive than other people (Ickes, 1993; Koole, 2009). Indeed, it has even been found that people who are particularly narcissistic (and hence insensitive to others) think they are exceptionally emotionally sensitive (Ames and Kammrath, 2004). But even though people appear to have inaccurate emotional metacognition at a global level, it is not the case that people have poor emotional metacognition at the relative accuracy level: most people know whether they have understood or not understood particular emotional expressionsdindeed, people with autism notwithstanding, most people are very good at these relative judgments of emotional expression (Kelly and Metcalfe, 2011; Zimmerman and Kelley, 2010). Both global and relative accuracy level metacognition have consequences for control. In metacognition research, the term control means our ability to regulate our learning or retrieval. But the consequences of global and relative accuracy level metacognition are different. For example, having high confidence that you have remembered everything and are doing very well, at a global level, might lead you to stop studying and go to a football game. (If you were wrong about how well you have remembered, this resultant lack of study might hurt your test performance.) Being inaccurate about which items you know and do not know may also impact performance, but in a different way. Presumably, if your control processes were intact you would choose to study the items you thought you did not yet know, and would not waste your time on items you already know. But if a person were wrong about which ones they knew and did not know they would almost inevitably end up choosing to study the wrong itemsdperhaps those that they already knew. Of course, having accurate relative accuracy does not guarantee that it will be used appropriatelydmetacognitive monitoring and control are different and dissociable processes. For instance, middle-childhood children have been shown to have highly accurate relative accuracydthey know whether they know particular items or not. Nevertheless, they frequently choose to study items that they already know (saying things like they want to study items they already know because they are more fun or they like them better, see Metcalfe and Finn, 2013). In contrast to these information-based evaluations of our memory and knowledge (see, Efklides, 2011; Winne and Azevedo, 2014), metamemory awareness refers to our feelings or experiences of our own memory (Schwartz and Metcalfe, 2011). For example, in a tip-of-the-tongue state (TOTs), a person has a strong feeling that an unretrieved itemwill be recalled even though that retrieval is actually not taking place. What makes a TOTs unique is the strong feeling that marks its presencedit cannot be shaken, and elsewhere one can find colorful quotes that have been used to describe it (Metcalfe and Schwartz, 2016). TOT experiences occur often, but other metamemory experiences may take place only rarely. Déjà vu experiences occur quite rarely and represent strong feelings that an experience now occurred earlier as well (Schwartz and Cleary, 2016). Consider a person who visits Bimini in the Bahamas for