So, what are metacognitive feelings? Put succinctly but loosely: they are feelings about thinking. Why ‘metacognitive’? Cognition, broadly understood, is the processing of information; metacognition involves the monitoring and control of cognition. That includes judgments about thinking, such as trying to rate how good you are at a certain type of mental task. But it also includes metacognitive feelings, which help us to evaluate and regulate cognitive activity (View Highlight)
Metacognitive feelings tend to be mild and sometimes run in the background, so that one has to reflect on them to fully notice them. But they are feelings nonetheless, just like anger or sadness. They have valence (the feeling of knowing feels good, the feeling of forgetting feels bad); they vary in their level of arousal (think of the exciting ‘aha’ moments of insight, versus a mild feeling of familiarity); and they are embodied and guided by visceral information (eg, an increase in heart rate), like other feelings are. (View Highlight)
Our perspective is framed by theories that depict the brain as a prediction machine. A key idea here is that our brains are constantly riding the ups and downs of the uncertainty that surrounds us. Part of this uncertainty has to do with our own cognitive processes and capacities (Am I doing this multiplication right? Will I be able to recall what the capital of Nepal is?) In this context, visceral changes such as an increased heart rate serve as cues about the uncertainty associated with a particular cognitive process. What metacognitive feelings do is model how well the process – whether it’s multiplying two numbers, remembering a name, or something else – is likely to unfold, based on those cues. If the process is expected to run smoothly, positive metacognitive feelings, like feeling confident, will arise; if the process is expected to go awry, negative metacognitive feelings, like the feeling of error, will be the ones taking over. (View Highlight)
Crucially, metacognitive feelings such as the feeling of knowing don’t just give you a passive assessment of the situation (You know the answer to this question), they also drive action (Press the buzzer! You know this one!) (View Highlight)
metacognición sentimientos agencia
As such examples illustrate, we shouldn’t think of feelings as ‘getting in the way’ of higher cognitive processes; they play a crucial role in thinking. The feeling of knowing was found to accurately reflect the quality of learning in one previous study. And when people have to choose what to restudy for tests, they rely on their feelings of knowing in an adaptive way (View Highlight)
metacognitive feelings can sometimes lead you astray. In a cleverly designed experiment, participants were given a sentence in which one word was scrambled, such as: ‘Free will is a powerful oinliusl.’ Then, they had to solve the anagram, resulting in a sentence that encapsulated a particular worldview: ‘Free will is a powerful illusion.’ Participants were then asked to rate the sentence on a truth scale, from definitely false to definitely true. They were also asked if they had experienced an ‘aha’ moment. The researchers found that participants rated the statement as truer when they had experienced ‘aha’ moments after solving the anagram. The problem is that, in this case, the metacognitive feeling had been artificially induced. Obviously, whether or not you get a feeling of sudden insight after solving the anagram ‘oinliusl’ has no bearing on whether free will is an illusion. (View Highlight)
Otro ejemplo más de que el sistema nervioso fue esculpido para sobrevivir, no para representar adecuadamente la realidad. Todos sus sesgos debiesen, en principio, ser rastreables a desafíos evolutivos especificos.