Dunlosky & Metcalfe: "Metacognition"

Two prestigious authors, John Dunlosky and Janet Metcalfe, have published on September the first introduction to Metacognition for undergraduates. Dunlosky is a Professor of Psychology at Kent State University and Metcalfe is a Professor of Psychology and of Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University. This book is an excellent tool for understanding in a concise way the state of the art of the emergent field of the Metacognition. From a didactic point of view, we remark the presence in each chapter of boxes presenting specific subjects and closing the chapters, questions discussion and review concepts which allow to consolidate the learning.

An introduction starts presenting the metacognitive model of Nelson and Narens (1990), the most followed model in this area. In this model, the interplay between the meta-levels and the object-level defines the two process-based activities of metacognition: monitoring and control: control is exerted whenever the meta-level modifies the object-level; controlling the object-level provides no information about the states of the object-level. For it, you must monitor the object-level activities so that you can update the model of them.

Chapter 2 presents a very interesting History about the theoretical development of the concept. Perhaps it´s the first historical compendium published. Since the modern pioneer John Flavell to Asher Koriat many names and photos of researchers are included.

Section 1 analyzes the main empirical methods for investigating the Metacognition and chapter 4 speaks about feeling-of-Knowing (FOK) judgments and Tip-of-the-Tongue states. In the first case, Dunlosky and Metcalfe introduce theories like "Target Stregth" (Hart, 1967), "Cue Familiarity" (Reder, 1987) or "Target Accessibility" (Koriat, 1993). An interesting section about the contributions by Lynne Reder and colleagues on strategy selection by means of (FOK) judgments, finishes the chapter.

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are decisive for Education. In a seminal work, Arbuckle and Cuddy (1969) argued that if paired associates "differed in associative strengths immediately following presentation, subjects should be able to detect these differences just as they can detect differences in strength of any other input signal". Their students studied short lists of paired associates, and inmediately after studying each one, they judged whether or not they would recall it. Following Dunlosky and Metcalfe (p. 94), research on JOLs has focused on contexts in which extra study typically does improve memory. Besides self-feedback from intervening test trials does benefit the relative accuracy of JOLs. There are several hypothesis explaning the effects of JOLs. Begg et al. (1989) proposed that JOLs are based on the ease of processing an item inmediately prior to making the judgment. Bjork and Schwartz (1998) have demonstrated the effect of retrieval fluency on JOLs. Koriat (1997) has used the cue-utilization approach. Acording to this perspective, people use a variety of cues-item relatedness, number of study trials...-to infer whether an item will be remembered.

Confidence judgments or retrospective confidence (RC) judgments are analysed in chapter six. What causes the overconfidence effect? Perhaps cognitive biases distort people´s judgments but the overconfidence effect is probably an artifact of experimental methods.

Source judgments (chapter seven) involve remembering the source of a memory or the context in which a memory originally occurred. Between the factors that influence source-monitoring accuracy are the similarity of the sources and emotion and imagery.

Chapter eight is a very interesting one. The authors review some findings on people´s assessment of the truth of witnesses´memories based on their expressed confidence, and on people´s abilities to detect lies. Many cases are presented specially about hindsight bias: this effect has important implications for the criminal justice system, for isues as whether jurors are able to disregard testimony that has been ruled inadmisible.

In chapter nine, are considered in detail the wide connections of Metacognition to Education and this textbook finishes including a section about life-span development. We remark in chapter ten the interesting references on development of theory of mind and metacognition. In the other side (chapter eleven), it´s reviewed the problem of aging and memory monitoring.

This book is not only the first textbook to focus on Metacognition but perhaps the first book in covering metacognitive research in an unified framework. It´s also an excellent handbook for more advanced students and has been writen by two authentic champions of the subject.