Metamemory - History

History

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" (p. 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” (p. 477). 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.