Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

I present a novel method of conceptualizing metacognition in a computational hierarchy. Metacognition is commonlydescribed as cognition acting on itself, and correlates with enhanced performance in memory, reasoning, emotional reg-ulation, and motor skills. Understanding metacognition requires surmounting two barriers: its high-level abstraction anddisputed terminology. To overcome these barriers I employ a computational cognitive architecture to first define the baseunits of cognition and how they come to act on themselves. Well-defined computational units are built up into a hierarchyof cognitive processes. These forms of cognition are then connected back to clarify the research literature. Each formis built into working models within ACT-R to support this hierarchical systems viability. The intention of this hierar-chical model is to help clarify the nature of metacognition by supplementing verbal cognitive definition with rigorouscomputational terminology.