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Metacognitive Feelings

What are metacognitive feelings and what is their role in explaining the developmental emergence of knowledge?

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Notes

Metacognitive feelings connect fast and slow processes

According to Koriat,

‘metacognitive feelings ... allow a transition from the implicit-automatic mode to the explicit-controlled mode of operation’ (Koriat, 2000, p. 150).

Koriat’s focus is not dual-process theories, but his claim hints that metacognitive feelings might be relevant to understanding how fast processes could influence slow processes.

What Are Metacognitive Feelings?

Metacognitive feelings include:

This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list. Dokic (2012) lists several more, and others have postulated novel metacognitive feelings (for example, Velasco & Casati (2020) argue that there is a metacognitive feeling of disorientation). It is also possible that some items on the list do not qualify as metacognitive feelings.

What makes something a metacognitive feeling? I adapt an idea from Dokic (which is not actually about metacognitive feelings):

‘the causal antecedents of [certain] feelings can be said to be metacognitive insofar as they involve implicit monitoring mechanisms that are sensitive to non-intentional properties of first-order cognitive processes’ (Dokic, 2012, p. 310).

I propose that a metacognitive feeling is a feeling which is caused by a metacognitive process, that is, a process which monitors another cognitive process. For example, a process which monitors the fluency of recall, or of action selection, is a metacognitive process.

The Feeling of Familiarity

What causes feelings of familiarity? Not familiarity as such, it turns out. Instead they are caused by the ease with which you can process the features of a face relative to difficulty of identifying the person. Roughly, the greater the discrepancy between fluency of processing and difficulty of identification, the stronger the feeling of familiarity (Whittlesea & Williams, 1998).

So what is this feeling of familiarity?

First, it is phenomenal. It is an aspect of the phenomenal character of some experience associated with acting. So we can call it a feeling.

Second, it is metacognitive in the sense that it’s normal causes include processes which monitor fluency of processing. This is why the feeling of familiarity counts as a metacognitive feeling.

Third, it does not necessarily give rise to beliefs. The feeling does not lessen even if you believe (or know) that the thing which causes your feeling of familiarity is not one you have ever encountered before.

Fourth, you are not forced to treat feelings of familiarity as being about actual familiarity: instead you can use feeling of familiarity in deciding whether a stimulus is from that grammar (Wan, Dienes, & Fu, 2008). In this respect, metacognitive feelings are unlike perceptual experiences and unlike emotions. As Dokic observes:

‘It is difficult to imagine fear that does not have the function of detecting danger. In contrast, many [metacognitive] feelings seem to be recruited by the organism through some form of learning’ (Dokic, 2012, p. 308).

The Sense of Agency

Feelings of agency, seem to arise from a number of cues including comparison between outcomes represented motorically and outcomes detected sensorily and the fluency of an action selection process (that is, the ease or difficulty involved in selecting one among several possible actions to perform motorically; this can be manipulated by, for example, providing helpful or misleading cues to action (Wenke, Fleming, & Haggard, 2010; Sidarus, Chambon, & Haggard, 2013; Sidarus, Vuorre, & Haggard, 2017)).

The sense of agency is relevant to us because it serves to link two largely independent processes concerned with evaluating whether you are the agent of an event. One involves detecting the cues just mentioned; the other involves thinking about how likely it is that you are the agent of an event, perhaps in the light of your background knowledge.

Metacognitive Feelings as Sensations

Metacognitive feelings are aspects of the overall phenomenal character of experiences which their subjects take to be informative about things that are only distantly related (if at all) to the things that those experiences intentionally relate the subject to.[2]

To illustrate, having a feeling of familiarity is not a matter of standing in any intentional relation to the property of familiarity, but it is something that we can interpret as informative about familiarity.[3]

We might think of metacognitive feelings as lacking intentional objects altogether; this would make them like sensations in Reid (1785)’s sense. Not everyone accepts that such things could exist, of course (because they aim to explicate phenomenology in terms of intentional content or whatever). We can be agnostic by noting that nothing is lost by treating metacognitive feelings as if they were sensations.

Sensations are:

  • monadic properties of events, specifically perceptual experiences,
  • individuated by their normal causes—in the case of feelings of familiarity, its normal cause is ease of processing
  • which alter the overall phenomenal character of those experiences
  • in ways not determined by the experiences’ contents (so two experiences can have the same content while one has a sensational property which the other lacks).

If this is right, why do metacognitive feelings invite judgements? Why does the feeling of familiarity (say) even so much as nudge you to judge that the face photographed here is familiar to you? (This is roughly Dokic (2012)’s question.)

Metacognitive Feelings Are Intentional Isolators

Metacognitive feelings have no intentional objects, or none that are related to any beliefs that you might ordinarily acquire on the basis of them. They therefore serve as intentional isolators. That is, they provide a nonintentional link between two intentional states. The processes involved in action selection (or face processing) involve representations of an action (or face), and the beliefs you acquire also intentionally specify an action (or face). But the metacognitive feeling of agency (or of familiarity) that connects these two has no such intentional object. In acquiring the belief, you have to form a view about what caused the feeling.

The feeling of familiarity is reliably caused by things which are familiar. This is because in a limited, but useful, range of cases, things which you can process fluently are things which are familiar to you. After all, familiarity is one (of several) causes of ease of processing.

Over time you learn, perhaps implicitly, to associate the feeling of familiarity with things being familiar. (Although you can unlearn this association in a carefully controlled experimental setting; Wan et al., 2008.)

So a fast processes causes a feeling, which triggers a learned association, which in turn biases a slow process to determine that the likely cause of the feeling is familiar.

This is one model for how fast processes can influence slow processes.

Glossary

automatic : As we use the term, a process is automatic just if whether or not it occurs is to a significant extent independent of your current task, motivations and intentions. To say that mindreading is automatic is to say that it involves only automatic processes. The term `automatic' has been used in a variety of ways by other authors: see Moors (2014, p. 22) for a one-page overview, Moors & De Houwer (2006) for a detailed theoretical review, or Bargh (1992) for a classic and very readable introduction
cognitively efficient : A process is cognitively efficient to the degree that it does not consume working memory and other scarce cognitive resources.
fast : A fast process is one that is to to some interesting degree cognitively efficient (and therefore likely also some interesting degree automatic). These processes are also sometimes characterised as able to yield rapid responses.
Since automaticity and cognitive efficiency are matters of degree, it is only strictly correct to identify some processes as faster than others.
The fast-slow distinction has been variously characterised in ways that do not entirely overlap (even individual author have offered differing characterisations at different times; e.g. Kahneman, 2013; Morewedge & Kahneman, 2010; Kahneman & Klein, 2009; Kahneman, 2002): as its advocates stress, it is a rough-and-ready tool rather than an element in a rigorous theory.
intentional isolator : An event or state which links representations but either lacks intentional features entirely or else has intentional features that are only very distantly related to those of the two representations it links. Metacognitive Feelings and behaviours are paradigm intentional isolators.
metacognitive feeling : A metacognitive feeling is a feeling which is caused by a metacognitive process. Paradigm examples of metacognitive feelings include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling that something is on the tip of your tongue, the feeling of confidence and the feeling that someone’s eyes are boring into your back. On this course, we assume that one characteristic of metacogntive feelings is that either they lack intentional objects altogether, or else what their subjects take them to be about is typically only very distantly related to their intentional objects. (This is controversial---see Dokic, 2012 for a variety of conflicting theories.)
metacognitive process : A process which monitors another cognitive process. For instance, a process which monitors the fluency of recall, or of action selection, is a metacognitive process.
slow : converse of fast.

References

Bargh, J. A. (1992). The Ecology of Automaticity: Toward Establishing the Conditions Needed to Produce Automatic Processing Effects. The American Journal of Psychology, 105(2), 181–199. https://doi.org/10.2307/1423027
Brown, A. S. (1991). A review of the tip-of-the-tongue experience. Psychological Bulletin, 109(2), 204–223. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.109.2.204
Brown, A. S., & Marsh, E. J. (2010). Digging into Déjà Vu: Recent Research on Possible Mechanisms. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 53, pp. 33–62). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-7421(10)53002-0
Dokic, J. (2012). Seeds of self-knowledge: Noetic feelings and metacognition. In M. J. Beran, J. L. Brandl, J. Perner, & J. Proust (Eds.), Foundations of metacognition (pp. 302–321). Oxford University Press.
Haggard, P., & Chambon, V. (2012). Sense of agency. Current Biology, 22(10), R390–R392. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.02.040
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Moors, A. (2014). Examining the mapping problem in dual process models. In Dual process theories of the social mind (pp. 20–34). Guilford.
Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.2.297
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Reid, T. (1785a). An inquiry into the human mind (Fourth Edition). London: T. Cadell et al.
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Scott, R. B., & Dienes, Z. (2008). The conscious, the unconscious, and familiarity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34(5), 1264–1288.
Sidarus, N., Chambon, V., & Haggard, P. (2013). Priming of actions increases sense of control over unexpected outcomes. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1403–1411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.09.008
Sidarus, N., Vuorre, M., & Haggard, P. (2017). How action selection influences the sense of agency: An ERP study. NeuroImage, 150, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.02.015
Velasco, P. F., & Casati, R. (2020). Subjective disorientation as a metacognitive feeling. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 20(4), 281–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/13875868.2020.1768395
Wan, L., Dienes, Z., & Fu, X. (2008). Intentional control based on familiarity in artificial grammar learning. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(4), 1209–1218.
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Endnotes

  1. Widner, Otani, & Winkelman (2005) provides evidence that the feeling of knowing is distinct from the feeling that something is on the tip of your tongue. ↩︎

  2. This is consistent with, but weaker than, Koriat’s theory: ‘metacognitive feelings are mediated by the implicit application of nonanalytic heuristics ...\ [which] operate below full consciousness, relying on a variety of cues ...\ [and] affect metacognitive judgments by influencing subjective experience itself’ (Koriat, 2000, p. 158; see also Koriat, 2007, pp. 313--5). ↩︎

  3. Why accept this? You cannot perceive familiarity or agency any more than you can perceive electricity. Perceptual processes do not reach far back into your past, nor are they concerned with questions about whether you are the agent of an action. So to think that metacognitive feelings intentionally relate you to facts about familiarity or agency requires postulating a novel kind of sensory process, some kind of inner or bodily sense. ↩︎