Foundations of Metacognition

Metacognition has been described as 'thinking about thinking', and metacognition research has become a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary research in the cognitive sciences. There have been major changes in this field recently, stimulated by the controversial issues of metacognition in nonhuman animals and in early infancy. Consequently the question what defines a metacognitive process has become a matter of debate: How should one distinguish between simple minds that are not yet capable of any metacognitive processing, and minds with a more advanced architecture that exhibit such a capacity? This is the basic question that the present volume addresses from three different perspectives: from an evolutionary point of view the book asks whether there is sufficient evidence that some non-human primates or other animals monitor their mental states and thereby exhibit a form of metacognition. From a developmental perspective we ask when children start to monitor, evaluate and control their own minds. And from a philosophical point of view the main issue is how to draw the line between cognitive and metacognitive processes, and how to integrate the different functions in which metacognition is involved into a single coherent picture of the mind. The foundations of metacognition - whatever they will turn out to be - have to be as complex as this pattern of connections we discover in its effects. This is the view we promote with this volume.