One observation I have about this week's materials is how central a role language plays in the evolution of metacognitive theories, at least in this subject area. In some ways, it stands to reason that if you can't talk about something, it's difficult to make progress on it. But metacognitive psychology in particular seems closely tied to the existence of models -- and, thanks to the behaviorists -- key experimental techniques tied to these models. By contrast, biology and physical sciences seem to make progress devoting substantial portions of their effort to observation, and description, as well as the development of language and theory alongside these techniques. Modern neurobiology seems to offer a great deal to metacognition, hence cognitive neuroscience.
The history of metacognition was full of surprises and new information for me -- the rather 'fuzzy' initial experimental approaches taken by true introspectionists, the shock treatment administered by the behaviorists, the careful reclamation of a theory of consciousness and reasoning, or at least a theory of something beyond stimulus. It occurs to me that introspectionists and behaviorists have something in common -- they all seemed to model the mind with a focus on a two-step process: memory -> recall; thought -> action; stimulus -> response. Whether the mind was sufficiently divisible to observe these processes or not, they seem to have very few steps or variables involved. Neither school seemed to specifically address or model what we call reasoning. More modern theories of mind seem to recognize that human thinking is more like a stew than a broth -- composed of a range of impulses, analytical skills, knowledge, memories, and so on.
One way that we learn about our minds is through our children -- our own, or through larger experiments involving children. I enjoyed the experiments that revealed that people don't always know when they have something memorized, or they choose the thing on the right even though it's identical to the others. We watch them grow, and learn about them,, human development, our own selves at the same time. My older daughter at the age of 5 came home from school with a metacognitive theory of her own -- she talks about her "true-teller", which seems to be a more focused and thinking part of her brain. Sometimes if we ask how she knows something, or why she thinks something, she'll tell us that her true-teller told her. My younger daughter at 4 taught me a significant lesson about how language works, when I asked her "Why did you let your sister cut your hair?" and she told me, "Mom, she letted her own self!". I rejoiced in the milestone she achieved when, after hearing me describe the wonders of the rainforest, she asked 'How do we know that?'. The world of children is a continual source of amazement.
I found it a little bit funny that something so basic -- the 'tip of the tongue' experience -- offered so much fodder to scientists over the centuries. I suppose the universal nature of the experience is helpful here. Another surely-universal experience that might be explored is when we only understand something retrospectively, or when we change our minds. Retrospective understanding might be defined as the piecing together of clues and information that only make sense now that we have some distance from them. Changing one's mind also seems like a rich source of theories and analysis -- we know it is difficult, and that new information is not enough. I wonder what the behaviorists had to say about the data here. Something I still have questions about is how these ideas fit together with other parts of psychology and neurobiology -- the parts of mind in Freud (which seem useful even if many of his specific assessments are discounted now) and other psychology frameworks.
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