Metacognition in Comparative Perspective

描述（由申请人提供）：监控一个人学习、认知和记忆状态的能力对每一项智力和教育活动都是至关重要的。了解成人这种能力的认知组织，并追踪其系统发育的出现，将支持元认知动物模型的发展，扩大研究人员可用的元认知范式的范围，有助于阐明人类儿童元认知的最早根源，支持语言迟缓或自闭症儿童的元认知研究，并可能为教育困难人群的元认知训练奠定基础。因此，本项目探索认知监测和认知控制能力，称为元认知。研究设计包括评估人类和非人类灵长类动物对精神状态的监测以及它们对认知过程的指导控制。这些任务将允许人类和猴子拒绝完成困难的试验，评估他们的信心，自适应地分配学习时间，自我评估他们的记忆，并判断他们的学习质量。利用这些任务，本研究将研究强化/学习在元认知中的作用，探讨不确定性和信心是否能够独立于学习历史和强化偶然事件，同时灵活地推广到新任务。本研究将运用认知神经科学的过程解离方法来评估元认知判断在心理特征上是否具有执行性和注意性。它将询问在人类和动物的时间扩展问题解决过程中元认知是否可能，从而首次在时间上接近元认知。它将通过使用信心赌注和表现信心分离和一致性来探索人类和动物伴随元认知的意识水平。它将首次通过检验学习判断和记忆质量标准，拓宽元认知的比较研究。通过对元认知的认知控制维度的考察，拓宽了元认知的比较研究。认知控制——信息处理策略和信息收集活动根据任务表现灵活调整——也是一项重要的教育功能。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The capacity to monitor one's state of learning, knowing, and remembering is critical to every intellectual and educational activity. Understanding the cognitive organization of this capacity in adult humans, and tracing its phylogenetic emergence, would support the development of animal models for metacognition, expand the range of metacognitive paradigms available to researchers, help illuminate the earliest roots of metacognition in human children, support the study of metacognition in language-delayed or autistic children, and possibly ground efforts to train metacognition in educationally challenged populations. Accordingly, this project explores the cognitive-monitoring and cognitive-control capacity that is called metacognition. The research design includes tasks that assess the monitoring of mental states by humans and nonhuman primates and their guiding control over their cognitive processes. These tasks will allow humans and monkeys to decline to complete difficult trials, to rate their confidence, to allocate study time adaptively, to self-evaluate their memory, and to judge the quality of their learning. Using these tasks, the proposed research will study the role of reinforcement/learning in metacognition, asking whether uncertainty and confidence can show independence from learning history and reinforcement contingencies while generalizing flexibly to novel tasks. The research will use methods of process dissociation from cognitive neuroscience to evaluate whether metacognitive judgments are executive and attentional in psychological character. It will ask whether metacognition is possible during temporally-extended problem solving by humans and animals, thus approaching metacognition chronometrically for the first time. It will explore-through the use of confidence wagers and performance-confidence dissociations and concordances- the level of awareness that accompanies metacognition in humans and animals. It will broaden the comparative study of metacognition by examining judgments-of-learning and memory-quality criteria for the first time. It will also broaden the comparative study of metacognition by examining the cognitive-control dimension of metacognition. Cognitive control-by which information-processing strategies and information- gathering activities are flexibly tailored to task performance-is also a critical educational function.