Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metacognition may be broadly understood as awareness, monitoring, and regulation of an intelligent agent’s owninternal processing, a “thinking about thinking”. The cognitive complexity and self-maintenance value of this introspectiveskillset has considerable current interest in the study of both biological and artificial intelligence, with intriguing parallels.Study of metacognition in some nonhuman species and Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architecture (BICA) systems reflectevidence of, at best, an attenuated form of the elaborated human manifestation, with ongoing difficulties in operationalizingmetacognitive components and traits. A linked exploration of these “inhuman” forms of metacognition may better clarify thelocus of divergence from the human form and illuminate the role of the skill in supporting potentially emergent cognitivetraits, from self-recognition to Theory of Mind understanding. The current review will take a comparative approach in as-sessing metacognitive systems in nonhuman biological and artificial agents in pursuit of clarity for future methodological andconceptual directions.