Metamemory: A Theoretical Framework and New Findings

This chapter focuses on research program, providing a description of a theoretical framework that has evolved out of metamemory research, followed by a few remarks about the methodology. Research in metamemory is initiated by the paradoxical findings that people can accurately predict their subsequent likelihood of recognizing nonrecallable items and that they can quickly and accurately decide-on the basis of no more than a cursory search through memory-that they will not retrieve particular sought after items. Those findings lead to develop a methodology based on psychophysical methods that are used to empirically investigate people's feeling of knowing. The results of the experiments convinced that for dealing with only a part of a complex metacognitive system and to account adequately for feeling-of-knowing phenomena, a larger perspective was needed. This eventuated in the present theoretical framework that emphasizes the role of control and monitoring processes. The embedding of the feeling of knowing in a richer framework helped to dissipate the paradoxical nature of the feeling of knowing. The chapter discusses that today there are many capable, active investigators and a wealth of solid empirical findings.