Metamemory

Metamemory or Socratic awareness, a type of metacognition, is both the introspective knowledge of one’s own memory capabilities (and strategies that can aid memory) and the processes involved in memory self-monitoring. This self-awareness of memory has important implications for how people learn and use memories. When studying, for example, students make judgements of whether they have successfully learned the assigned material and use these decisions, known as 'judgments of learning', to allocate study time.(1) There is a strong correlation between indices of frontal lobe function or structural integrity and metamemory accuracy (2) The combination of frontal lobe dysfunction and poor memory severely impairs metamemorial processes (3) Metamemory tasks vary in subject performance levels, and quite likely, in the underlying processes these different tasks measure, and (4) Metamemory, as measured by experimental tasks, may dissociate from basic memory retrieval processes and from global judgments of memory.:105 Metamemory or Socratic awareness, a type of metacognition, is both the introspective knowledge of one’s own memory capabilities (and strategies that can aid memory) and the processes involved in memory self-monitoring. This self-awareness of memory has important implications for how people learn and use memories. When studying, for example, students make judgements of whether they have successfully learned the assigned material and use these decisions, known as 'judgments of learning', to allocate study time. Descartes, among other philosophers, marveled at the phenomenon of what we now know as metacognition. 'It was not so much thinking that was indisputable to Descartes, but rather thinking about thinking. He could not imagine that the person engaged in such self-reflective processing did not exist'.:197 In the late 19th century, Bowne and James contemplated, but did not scientifically examine, the relationship between memory judgments and memory performance. During the reign of behaviorism in the mid-20th century, unobservable phenomena such as metacognition were largely ignored. One early scientific study of metamemory was Hart's 1965 study, which examined the accuracy of feeling of knowing (FOK). FOK occurs when an individual feels that he or she has something in memory that cannot be recalled, but would be recognized if seen. Hart expanded upon limited investigations of FOK which had presupposed that FOK was accurate. The results of Hart’s study indicate that FOK is indeed a relatively accurate indicator of what is in memory. In a 1970 review of memory research, Tulving and Madigan concluded that advances in the study of memory might require the experimental investigation of “one of the truly unique characteristics of human memory: its knowledge of its own knowledge”.:477 It was around the same time that John H. Flavell coined the term 'metamemory' in a discussion on the development of memory. Since then, numerous metamemory phenomena have been studied, including judgments of learning, feelings of knowing, knowing that you don't know, and know vs. remember. Nelson and Narens proposed a theoretical framework for understanding metacognition and metamemory. In this framework there are two levels: the object level (for example, cognition and memory) and the meta level (for example, metacognition and metamemory). Information flow from the meta level to the object level is called control, and information flow from the object level to the meta level is called monitoring. Both monitoring and control processes occur in acquisition, retention, and retrieval. Examples of control processes are allocating study time and selecting search strategies, and examples of monitoring processes are ease-of-learning (EOL) judgments and FOK judgments. The study of metamemory has some similarities to introspection in that it assumes that a memorizer is able to investigate and report on the contents of memory. Current metamemory researchers acknowledge that an individual's introspections contain both accuracies and distortions and are interested in what this conscious monitoring (even if it is not always accurate) reveals about the memory system. The cue familiarity hypothesis was proposed by Reder and Ritter after completing a pair of experiments which indicated that individuals can evaluate their ability to answer a question before trying to answer it. This finding suggests that the question (cue) and not the actual memory (target) is crucial for making metamemory judgments. Consequently, this hypothesis implies that judgements regarding metamemory are based on an individual’s level of familiarity with the information provided in the cue. Therefore, an individual is more likely to judge that they know the answer to a question if they are familiar with its topic or terms and more likely to judge that they do not know the answer to a question which presents new or unfamiliar terms. The accessibility hypothesis suggests that memory will be accurate when the ease of processing (accessibility) is correlated with memory behaviour; however, if the ease of processing is not correlated with memory in a given task, then the judgments will not be accurate. Proposed by Koriat, the theory suggests that participants base their judgments on retrieved information rather than basing them on the sheer familiarity of the cues. Along with the lexical unit, people may use partial information that could be correct or incorrect. According to Koriat, the participants themselves do not know whether the information they are retrieving is correct or incorrect most of the time. The quality of information retrieved depends on individual elements of that information. The individual elements of information differ in strength and speed of access to the information. Research by Vigliocco, Antonini, and Garrett (1997) and Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) showed that individuals in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state were able to retrieve partial knowledge (gender) about the unrecalled words, providing strong evidence for the accessibility heuristic. The competition hypothesis is best described using three principles. The first is that many brain systems are activated by visual input, and the activations by these different inputs compete for processing access. Secondly, competition occurs in multiple brain systems and is integrated amongst these individual systems. Finally, competition can be assessed (using top-down neural priming) based on the relevant characteristics of the object at hand.