metacognition
met-uh-kog-NISH-uhn
Definition
The mental process of monitoring, evaluating, and regulating one's own thinking, learning, and decision-making.
Etymology
Derived from the Greek prefix 'meta-' (meaning 'beyond' or 'alongside') and the Latin 'cognitio' (meaning 'knowledge' or 'learning'). It was coined by developmental psychologist John Flavell in the 1970s to describe thinking about one's own thought processes.
In the news
The article distinguishes metacognition from raw intelligence, explaining that the ability to perform a task and the ability to assess the reliability of your own answer are separate mental skills.
Intelligent people can still be surprisingly bad at knowing when they are wrong, because solving a problem and judging the reliability of your own answer are partly separate mental tasks
Read the full article ↗scienceblog.com