Metacognitive Awareness and the Hot Hand: When Winning, No Amount of Awareness Will Have Strong Believers Avoid the Heuristic.

In some instances, such as in sports, individuals will cheer on the player with the "hot hand". But is the hot hand phenomenon a fallacy? The current research investigated (1) whether the hot hand fallacy (HHF) was related to risky decisions during a gambling scenario, and (2) whether metacognitive awareness might be related to optimal decisions. After measuring for baseline tendencies of using the hot hand heuristic, participants were presented with a series of prior card gambling results that included either winning streaks or losing streaks and asked to choose one of two cards: a good card or a bad card. In addition, we examined whether high metacognitive awareness-as measured by the ability to discriminate between correct and incorrect responses-would be negatively related to the risky decisions induced by the hot hand heuristic. The results showed that our predictions were partially supported. For winning streaks, individuals who had a weak tendency for using the heuristic exhibited fewer risky decisions with higher metacognitive awareness. However, those with a strong baseline tendency for using the hot hand showed no sign of decrease with metacognitive awareness. On the whole, the complex data suggest that further research on the HHF would be helpful for implementing novel ways of avoiding the fallacy, if needed.

Negative emotion can be "more negative" for those with high metacognitive abilities when problem-solving.

Introduction: Metacognitive monitoring ability enables you to learn and solve problems more efficiently through appropriate strategies. At the same time, those who are high in monitoring ability are known to allocate more cognitive resources to the perception and control of negative emotions, as compared to those with low metacognitive ability. Therefore, while monitoring emotions may help reduce the negative emotion by enabling efficient control, it could also interrupt the use of an efficient strategy when problem-solving, as cognitive resources may be depleted. Methods: To confirm this, we divided participants into groups with high and low monitoring abilities and manipulated emotions by presenting emotional videos. Subsequent to the manipulation, problem solving strategies were examined using items from the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). Results: Results showed that those who were high in monitoring ability were shown to use more efficient problem-solving strategies than those who were lower in monitoring ability, but only in situations when positive or no emotions were manipulated. However, as hypothesized, when negative emotion was aroused, the CRT scores of high monitoring ability group were significantly lowered, decreasing to the same performance as those with low monitoring ability. We also found that metacognitive monitoring ability, when interacting with emotion, indirectly affected CRT scores, and that monitoring and control, when affected by emotion, were mediated in the process. Discussion: These findings suggest a novel and complicated interaction between emotion and metacognition and warrant further research.

Emotion Perception Rules Abide by Cultural Display Rules.

The current study compared emotion perception in two cultures where display rules for emotion expression deviate. In Experiment 1, participants from America and Korea played a repeated prisoner's dilemma game with a counterpart, who was, in actuality, a programmed defector. Emotion expressions were exchanged via emoticons at the end of every round. After winning more points by defecting, the counterpart sent either a matching emoticon (a joyful face) or a mismatching emoticon (a regretful face). The results showed that Americans in the matching condition were more likely to defect, or to punish, compared to those in the mismatching condition, suggesting that more weight was given to their counterpart's joyful expression. This difference was smaller for Koreans, suggesting a higher disregard for the outward expression. In a second, supplementary experiment, we found that Korean participants were more likely to cooperate in the mismatching or regretful condition, when they thought their counterpart was a Westerner. Overall, our data suggest that emotion perception rules abide by the display rules of one's culture but are also influenced by the counterpart's culture.

Metacognitive Labeling of Contentious Claims: Facts, Opinions, and Conspiracy Theories.

Congenial information is often judged to be more valid than uncongenial (but otherwise equivalent) information. The present research explores a related possibility concerning the process by which people label a claim as fundamentally factual (open to proof or disproof) or opinion (a matter of personal preference not amenable to falsification). Rather than merely being more skeptical of uncongenial claims, uncongenial claims may be metacognitively categorized as more opinion than factual, while congenial claims may be more likely to be categorized as factual. The two studies reported here attempt to trace a preliminary outline of how claims are categorized as fact, opinion, or some mix of the two in the context of mundane claims, contentious political issues, and conspiracy theories. The findings suggest that claims are more likely to be labeled factual (and, to a lesser extent, are less likely to be labeled opinion) to the extent that one subjectively agrees with the content of the claim. Conspiracy theories appear to occupy a middle-ground between fact and opinion. This metacognitive approach may help shed light on popular debate about conspiracy theories, as well as seemingly intractable political disagreements more generally, which may reflect fundamental differences in the perceived epistemic foundations of claims rather than simple disagreement over the facts of the matter. Given limitations of the stimuli and participant samples, however, it remains to be seen how generalizable these findings are.

Prior failures, laboring in vain, and knowing when to give up: Incremental versus entity theories.

Against intuition, a set of "desirable difficulties" has been touted as a way in which to improve learning and lengthen retention. This includes, for instance, varying the conditions of learning to allow for more active, effortful, or challenging, contexts. In the current paper, we introduce data that show that, on the contrary, learning to know when to take the easy road may be crucial when it comes to avoiding "laboring in vain." We presented participants with prior problems - either easy or difficult - followed by choices of selecting an easy or a difficult current problem. Our primary goal was to examine the notion that past failures (which are more likely on the difficult prior items) may be a basis for allowing learners to then choose the easy rather than the difficult current problem. In other words, if one has labored in vain already, the easier items may now be more desirable. In addition, we compare the selections that are made between incremental and entity perspectives, given their fundamentally opposing views on effort. Our results showed that, interestingly, incremental theorists, who generally are proponents of effort, were more likely to select the easy problems, but only when they had experienced failure on prior, and similar, difficult tasks. We interpret these data to suggest that those holding an incremental view may be more in tune with their past efforts, resulting in a Metacognition-by-Experience, or ME strategy, and also hint at its generalizability through cross-cultural comparisons. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11409-020-09253-5.

Children's naive theories of intelligence influence their metacognitive judgments.

Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (M(age) = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders (M(age) = 10.39) read texts presented in easy- or difficult-to-encode fonts. The more children in both grades viewed intelligence as fixed, the less likely they were to interpret effortful or difficult encoding as a sign of increasing mastery and the more likely they were to report lower levels of comprehension as their perceived effort increased. This suggests that children may use naive theories of intelligence to make motivationally relevant inferences earlier than previously thought.

Metacognitive control and the spacing effect.

This study investigates whether the use of a spacing strategy absolutely improves final performance, even when the learner had chosen, metacognitively, to mass. After making judgments of learning, adult and child participants chose to mass or space their study of word pairs. However, 1/3 of their choices were dishonored. That is, they were forced to mass after having chosen to space and forced to space after having chosen to mass. Results showed that the spacing effect obtained for both adults and children when choices were honored. However, using a spacing strategy when it was in disagreement with the participant's own choice, or forced, did not enhance performance for the adults (Experiment 1). And although performance was enhanced for the children (beyond massing strategies), it was not as good as when the spacing decisions were self-chosen (Experiment 2). The data suggest that although spacing is an effective strategy for learning, it is not universal, particularly when the strategy is not chosen by the learner. In short, metacognitive control is often crucial and should be honored. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

The virtues of ignorance.

Although ignorance and uncertainty are usually unwelcome feelings, they have unintuitive advantages for both human and non-human animals, which we review here. We begin with the perils of too much information: expertise and knowledge can come with illusions (and delusions) of knowing. We then describe how withholding information can counteract these perils: providing people with less information enables them to judge more precisely what they know and do not know, which in turn enhances long-term memory. Data are presented from a new experiment that illustrates how knowing what we do not know can result in helpful choices and enhanced learning. We conclude by showing that ignorance can be a virtue, as long as it is recognized and rectified.

Comparative metacognition.

Metacognition is knowledge about knowledge, often expressed as confidence judgments about what we know. Most of the literature on metacognition in humans is based on subjects' verbal reports. Investigators of animal cognition have recently described nonverbal methods for investigating metacognition in animals. In one, subjects are given the option to escape from difficult trials. In another, subjects are trained to place bets about the accuracy of their most recent response. To rule out noncognitive interpretations of purported evidence of metacognition in animals, one must ensure that escape responses do not increase the overall density of reinforcement and that they do not occur in the presence of the stimuli on which the subject was trained. The nonverbal techniques used to investigate metacognition in animals make possible two interesting lines of research: investigating the contribution of language and explicit instruction in establishing metacognition, and the investigation of the neural substrates of metacognition.

Learners' choices and beliefs about self-testing.

Students have to make scores of practical decisions when they study. We investigated the effectiveness of, and beliefs underlying, one such practical decision: the decision to test oneself while studying. Using a flashcards-like procedure, participants studied lists of word pairs. On the second of two study trials, participants either saw the entire pair again (pair mode) or saw the cue and attempted to generate the target (test mode). Participants were asked either to rate the effectiveness of each study mode (Experiment 1) or to choose between the two modes (Experiment 2). The results demonstrated a mismatch between metacognitive beliefs and study choices: Participants (incorrectly) judged that the pair mode resulted in the most learning, but chose the test mode most frequently. A post-experimental questionnaire suggested that self-testing was motivated by a desire to diagnose learning rather than a desire to improve learning.

Underlying mechanisms of initial feelings of knowing in children.

Past research has pointed to two contrasting mechanisms behind feeling-of-knowing judgments (FOKs). The trace-based account proposes a direct internal monitor that detects the presence or non-presence of a target item. The inferential account dictates that judgments are actually based on cues external to the memory trace, such as familiarity; FOKs could therefore be based on sometimes misleading information. Thus, while a direct mechanism will lead to good learning strategies (i.e. successful searches), an inferential process could potentially lead to less optimal strategies (i.e. search for unknown target information). The question posed in this research was: What processes underlie the judgments children make prior to fully retrieving a target item? We used a simplified version of Reder and Ritter's (1992) game show paradigm to investigate the accuracy (and mechanism) of children's initial FOKs. The experiment found that initial FOKs were largely driven by familiarity of the cues. These data have important implications for strategies children utilize in educational settings.

Transfer of metacognitive skills and hint seeking in monkeys.

Metacognition is knowledge that can be expressed as confidence judgments about what one knows (monitoring) and by strategies for learning what one does not know (control). Although there is a substantial literature on cognitive processes in animals, little is known about their metacognitive abilities. Here we show that rhesus macaques, trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on perceptual tasks, transferred that ability immediately to a new perceptual task and to a working memory task. We also show that monkeys can learn to request "hints" when they are given problems that they would otherwise have to solve by trial and error. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that nonhuman primates share with humans the ability to monitor and transfer their metacognitive ability both within and between different cognitive tasks, and to seek new knowledge on a need-to-know basis.

A cognitive-science based programme to enhance study efficacy in a high and low risk setting.

In three experiments, learning performance in a 6- or 7-week cognitive-science based computer-study programme was compared to equal time spent self-studying on paper. The first two experiments were conducted with grade 6 and 7 children in a high risk educational setting, the third with Columbia University undergraduates. The principles the programme implemented included (1) deep, meaningful, elaborative, multimodal processing, (2) transfer-appropriate processing, (3) self-generation and multiple testing of responses, and (4) spaced practice. The programme was also designed to thwart metacognitive illusions that would otherwise lead to inappropriate study patterns. All three experiments showed a distinct advantage in final test performance for the cognitive-science based programme, but this advantage was particularly prominent in the children.

Metacognitive control and optimal learning.

The notion of optimality is often invoked informally in the literature on metacognitive control. We provide a precise formulation of the optimization problem and show that optimal time allocation strategies depend critically on certain characteristics of the learning environment, such as the extent of time pressure, and the nature of the uptake function. When the learning curve is concave, optimality requires that items at lower levels of initial competence be allocated greater time. On the other hand, with logistic learning curves, optimal allocations vary with time availability in complex and surprising ways. Hence there are conditions under which optimal strategies will be relatively easy to uncover, and others in which suboptimal time allocation might be expected. The model can therefore be used to address the question of whether and when learners should be able to exercise good metacognitive control in practice.

Judgments of learning: evidence for a two-stage process.

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that people make judgments of learning (JOLs) by attempting to retrieve the target first. If this were the whole story, then the reaction time (RT) functions for making JOLs with no special instructions would parallel those found when people are told to first attempt retrieval and then make a JOL. In the present data, monotonic functions, showing an increase in RT with decreasing JOL, were found when people were instructed to retrieve covertly or overtly and then make a JOL, as would be expected if retrieval fluency entirely determined JOLs. However, the functions for making uninstructed JOLs were different: Low JOLs were made quickly, not slowly, and the curves were inverted U shapes, rather than linear. Furthermore, people's memory performance was somewhat better, especially on low-JOL items, when they were instructed to first retrieve as opposed to when they were told only to make JOLs. To account for these data, we propose a two-stage model of JOLs, with the first stage occurring prior to attempted retrieval.

Spacing one's study: evidence for a metacognitive control strategy.

This article investigated individual control of spacing strategies during study. Three predictions were outlined: The spacing hypothesis suggests that people choose to space their study to improve long-term learning via the spacing effect. The massing hypothesis suggests that people choose to mass their study because of illusions of confidence during study. The metacognitive hypothesis suggests that people control their spacing schedules as a function of their metacognitive judgments of specific to-be-learned items. To test these hypotheses, the authors asked participants to study and make judgments of learning for cue-target pairs. Then, participants were given three choices; they could study the pair again immediately (massed), study the pair again after the entire list had been presented (spaced), or choose not to restudy (done). Results supported a metacognitively controlled spacing strategy-people spaced items that were judged to be relatively easy but massed items that were judged as relatively difficult.

Serial expertise of rhesus macaques.

Here we describe the development of serial expertise in 4 experimentally naive rhesus monkeys that learned, by trial and error, the correct order in which to respond to 3-, 4-, and 7-item lists of arbitrarily selected photographs. The probabilities of guessing the correct sequence on 3-, 4-, and 7-item lists were, respectively, 1/6, 1/24, and 1/5,040. Each monkey became progressively more efficient at determining the correct order in which to respond on new lists. During subsequent testing, the subjects were presented with all possible pairs of the 28 items used to construct the four 7-item lists (excluding pairs of items that occupied the same ordinal position in different lists). Subjects responded to pairs from different lists in the correct order 91% of the time on the first trials on which these pairs were presented. These features of subjects' performance, which cannot be attributed to procedural memory, satisfy two criteria of declarative memory: rapid acquisition of new knowledge and flexible application of existing knowledge to a new problem.

Implicit metacognition, explicit uncertainty, and the monitoring/control distinction in animal metacognition.

Smith et al. demonstrate the viability of animal metacognition research. We commend their effort and suggest three avenues of research. The first concerns whether animals are explicitly aware of their metacognitive processes. The second asks whether animals have metaknowledge of their own uncertain responses. The third issue concerns the monitoring/control distinction. We suggest some ways in which these issues elucidate metacognitive processes in nonhuman animals.