UC Irvine

Metacognition – the capacity to monitor and regulate one's own cognitive states – is often treated as a self-evaluation process that runs alongside conscious experience. This chapter argues for a stronger claim: that hierarchical uncertainty monitoring and the metacognitive construction of higher-order representations is partly causal in creating conscious experience, not merely correlated with it. The chapter establishes how metacognition may be implicit or explicit, traces the history of its measurement, discusses how it empirically dissociates from general task performance capacity, and briefly discusses potential functions of metacognition: consciousness, reality-monitoring, learning, and information-seeking. The chapter concludes by applying the discussed framework to artificial intelligence.