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Monitoring or control of one's own cognition. Metacognitive monitoring estimates aspects of current or future performance, while metacognitive control uses such estimates to guide behaviour. Metamemory applies these functions to remembering; uncertainty responses provide a way to study some of them without verbal reports. Successful behaviour alone need not establish introspection or subjective awareness.

The useful distinction in George Armitage Miller's position is between experiencing a mental event and knowing how that event was produced. An answer, image or feeling of difficulty can enter consciousness while the computations producing it remain inaccessible. Experiencing an intermediate thought also does not reveal the neural or cognitive mechanism generating that thought. Thus a restriction on introspection into mechanisms is compatible with awareness of some intermediate stages of reasoning.

There is evidence against treating an explanation of one's behaviour as a transparent record of its causes. Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson distinguished causal accounts constructed from plausible beliefs from direct access to the relevant processing.^[ref] A particularly clear experimental test is choice blindness: participants chose between faces, but the experimenter sometimes presented the rejected face as the selected one. Some participants accepted the substitution and explained the choice they had not made.^[ref] This challenges the reliability of retrospective causal explanations. It does not establish that every report of a current experience is false: noticing a vivid image and explaining why one preferred a face are different reporting tasks.

Metacognition does not require a complete inspection of the processes being monitored. A judgment of learning can use how easily an answer is retrieved; a retrospective confidence judgment can use the strength or consistency of available evidence. Such metacognitive monitoring is useful when these cues predict future recall or present correctness, even if the participant cannot explain why a cue is informative. A useful experimental distinction is consequently between report content, predictive accuracy and causal access. Measuring one does not settle the others.

Second-order inference about decisions provides a computational possibility: the observer estimates the correctness of a decision from partially shared evidence and the action taken, rather than reading an infallible internal label.^[ref] The computation producing this estimate can itself remain unconscious. Calling it second order specifies what it estimates, not a requirement that a person verbally reflect upon it.

The strongest interpretation of Miller's claim would exclude experience of any unfolding thought. That goes further than the evidence just considered. A person can report successive candidate answers, detect uncertainty, or notice attention drifting, while misdescribing the mechanisms responsible. Conversely, asking for an explanation can create a new inferential task, so a fluent explanation after the event is weak evidence that the same reasoning caused the original decision. Immediate reports, independent performance measures, experimentally manipulated cues and interventions on the proposed mechanism provide stronger tests than introspective plausibility alone. A defensible theory allows informative but selective access to mental states, with fallible inference about their causes; it need not choose between complete transparency and complete ignorance.