word
metacognition
met-ah-kog-NIH-shun
/ˌmɛtəkɒɡˈnɪʃən/Listen
Pick from 16 AI voices across American and British accents, and adjust playback speed to hear each syllable clearly. Every voice is generated once per term and cached for instant replays.
Syllable breakdown
metacognition
Dictionary meaning
Cognition about cognition: the ability to monitor, evaluate, and regulate one's own mental processes; in consciousness studies, metacognition is studied as a candidate marker of higher-order consciousness — the capacity to represent one's own mental states
History and origin
Greek meta (beyond/about) + Latin cognitio (knowing); introduced into cognitive psychology by John Flavell in 1979; extended to consciousness research by Christof Koch, Stanislas Dehaene, and others
Examples
- Metacognition is implicated when a subject rates their confidence in a perceptual decision, revealing access to their own mental states.
- Some theorists argue that metacognition, not mere perception, is the hallmark of genuine conscious awareness.
Synonyms: second-order cognition, meta-awareness, cognitive monitoring
Something wrong? Suggest a correction