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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.

Metamemory includes several judgments with different targets: a judgment of learning predicts later recall, a feeling of knowing predicts whether currently unrecalled material could be recognized, and retrospective confidence evaluates an answer already produced. Their accuracy can depend on different information. Agreement between two judgments is therefore not sufficient evidence for one directly inspected memory-strength variable.

In Asher Koriat's cue-utilization approach to metamemory, intrinsic metamemory cues concern the material, extrinsic metamemory cues concern study conditions, and mnemonic cues concern the learner's current processing experience. Paired-associate experiments compared item difficulty, repetition and study duration with both learning predictions and later recall. Item difficulty affected both measures, whereas some changes in study conditions improved recall more than judgments anticipated. Practice could improve item discrimination while producing underconfidence.^[ref] The different patterns argue against treating all judgments as an identical readout of eventual memory performance.

A useful manipulation changes an accessible cue while measuring whether memory changes with it. Matthew G. Rhodes and Alan D. Castel varied the printed size of studied words and collected itemwise learning predictions before a free-recall test. Larger words received higher predictions, despite little corresponding recall advantage; the effect changed when more diagnostic associative information was available.^[ref] This is evidence for cue use and cue competition, rather than evidence that large print inevitably improves learning. A cue's influence on a judgment and its validity for predicting memory must be measured separately.

The timing and content of the judgment matter too. Thomas O. Nelson and John Dunlosky found a delayed judgment-of-learning effect; their subsequent manipulation showed a strong benefit for delayed judgments made from the cue alone, with little corresponding benefit when the cue and target were both displayed.^[ref] A cue-alone test permits a retrieval attempt resembling what will be needed later; seeing the answer can instead make it accessible without establishing that it could be independently recovered. Delay alone is therefore an incomplete description of the effect.

These findings have three implications. First, a cue-based judgment can be accurate without privileged access to a stored trace: accuracy depends on the relation between the sampled cues and the eventual test. Second, metacognitive calibration and metacognitive resolution can change separately. Learning predictions can become better at ranking items while being systematically too low overall. Third, monitoring affects metacognitive control. If an easily read item is mistakenly considered learned, a learner may stop studying it too early. An appropriate study therefore measures subsequent choices and recall, rather than assuming that a changed confidence report necessarily improves learning.

Multiple cues do not imply that every cue has an independent additive weight, nor that the same weights hold across tasks. To distinguish models, factorially manipulate candidate cues, control prior knowledge and test format, and predict judgments separately from memory outcomes. Include delayed and immediate judgments without assuming that eliciting a judgment is itself behaviourally inert. The evidence supports context-sensitive inference from several cues, with predictable successes and illusions, rather than one universally accurate memory gauge.

A benefit can explain why a capacity is retained without showing that every occurrence is beneficial. Mind-wandering can support internally generated plans or new associations while competing with the external task. Explaining its prevalence requires comparing those possible gains with attention, monitoring and opportunity costs across contexts; prevalence alone is not evidence that natural selection optimized the observed frequency.

Benjamin Baird and colleagues used an incubation effect design with unusual-use problems. Between attempts, participants performed an undemanding task, a demanding task, rested, or had no break. The undemanding condition improved later performance on previously encountered problems and was associated with more reported mind wandering.^[ref] This supports a contextual benefit of a condition permitting mind wandering. Because the manipulation also changes external demands and other aspects of processing, it does not by itself show that each reported wandering episode caused the improvement, or that an unmonitored episode is better than a monitored one.

Costs are independently important. Smartphone experience sampling associated off-task thought with lower reported happiness.^[ref] Such observations concern everyday experience but are not randomized assignments to thought content. They cannot settle every causal direction or establish that all forms of internal thought have the same effect. Laboratory work separately distinguished mind wandering with and without meta-awareness, relating unrecognized episodes to failures of response inhibition in a word-encoding and target-detection task.^[ref] Thus a potentially useful change in thought content and a failure to notice that change should not be treated as one phenomenon.

An adaptive account can be formulated as a resource-allocation model. Continuously verifying attention has a cost; internally directed processing may have delayed value when current external demands are low. A policy that sometimes permits drift can outperform one that prevents every diversion. However, this is a conditional argument. It predicts that benefits depend on task importance, timing and the ability to return to the task. It does not establish that the actual policy is optimal, or that lapses during safety-critical activity are advantageous.

Other apparent failures require the same discipline. In self-consistency theory of confidence, relying on a fast consistency cue can be economical in an environment where consistent answers tend to be correct. Systematic misinformation can break that relation and produce confident errors.^[ref] Similarly, an imperfect judgment of learning might be cheaper than continually testing every item, but an observed illusion is not automatically a useful bias. One must compare it with feasible alternative policies under the same costs and show an actual benefit, rather than inventing a beneficial purpose after observing the error.

A convincing test would manipulate context and monitoring opportunity, separately measure intentionality and awareness, and assess both the current task and later benefits. It should distinguish immediate experimental utility, long-run learned adaptation and an evolutionary history. Benefits can explain some mind wandering and economical monitoring policies; they do not justify a universal adaptive explanation of metacognitive failure.