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Alan D. Castel studies human memory and metacognition. With Matthew G. Rhodes, he tested whether perceptual characteristics influence judgments of learning differently from later recall. Manipulating print size helped reveal a mismatch between a cue’s influence on prediction and its influence on performance. Measuring both outcomes makes it possible to identify a metacognitive illusion rather than assuming that an easily processed item will necessarily be remembered better. ^[ref]

Allison L. Foote coauthored an experimental study of metacognition in rats with Jonathon D. Crystal. Rats classified the duration of a stimulus and could instead select a decline option. Preferential use of that option on difficult trials, together with comparisons of forced and accepted tests, made uncertainty-sensitive behavior measurable without asking for a verbal explanation. The interpretation requires considering associative alternatives as well as the monitoring account. ^[ref]

A researcher in metacognition who proposed that subjective confidence depends on the consistency of evidence supporting an answer. In his self-consistency model, people can confidently choose a wrong answer when the accessible evidence consistently favors it. This separates the mechanism producing confidence from the external criterion used to judge its accuracy.^[ref]

Brian Maniscalco is a researcher in metacognition and its measurement. With Hakwan Lau, he introduced a method that estimates meta-d-prime from confidence reports and task outcomes. Comparing the estimate with first-order sensitivity asks how much task-relevant information is reflected in self-evaluation. It avoids identifying confidence magnitude alone with accurate monitoring, although the interpretation still depends on the specified signal detection theory model. ^[ref]

Consciousness includes subjective experience and the conditions under which information is available to awareness. Scientific studies distinguish such questions from general wakefulness and from the accuracy of a verbal report. Metacognition measures aspects of evaluating one’s own performance, but a confidence score is not by itself a complete measure of experience. Separating behavioral access, self-evaluation and proposed neural mechanisms makes competing accounts experimentally clearer. ^[ref]

Hakwan Lau studies awareness and metacognition. With Brian Maniscalco, he developed a signal detection theory approach for estimating metacognitive sensitivity from confidence ratings. The resulting meta-d-prime expresses confidence-based discrimination using a scale comparable to task sensitivity. The method separates how strongly confidence tracks correctness from a general tendency to use high or low confidence, while retaining assumptions about the modeled decision process. ^[ref]

John Dunlosky studies learning, human memory and metacognition, including how people assess what they will remember. His work with Thomas O. Nelson varied the timing and cue content of judgments of learning. A useful monitoring judgment predicts which items will later be recalled, which is different from merely reporting a high average expectation of success. This distinction helps connect laboratory judgments to decisions about further study. ^[ref]

Jonathon D. Crystal studies animal cognition, including tests of metacognition that do not require verbal reports. With Allison L. Foote, he examined rats’ use of an option to decline difficult duration-discrimination trials. Performance on accepted trials and the pattern of declining provide complementary evidence about uncertainty-sensitive behavior. Distinguishing monitoring from learned stimulus or reward cues is part of interpreting this experimental design. ^[ref]

Justin Kruger is a social psychologist who coauthored the original study associated with the Dunning-Kruger effect. Participants completed tasks and estimated their performance, allowing actual scores and self-assessments to be compared. Interpreting a grouped confidence-accuracy pattern requires separating an account about metacognition from effects of noisy measurement and selection on observed scores; the published pattern alone does not identify one exclusive mechanism. ^[ref]

Matthew G. Rhodes studies human memory and metacognition. With Alan D. Castel, he investigated how perceptual features such as print size influence judgments of learning. A feature could change predicted remembering without producing a matching change in later performance. The comparison separates a readily available cue from its actual predictive usefulness, illustrating how metacognitive judgments can depend on information that is salient but poorly calibrated to the final task. ^[ref]

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.

Non-human animals show evidence for several components of social-state tracking, but the evidence does not establish a uniform, human-like theory of mind. Theory of mind should be decomposed into sensitivity to goals, visual access, knowledge and belief, rather than treated as a single ability that an animal either possesses or lacks. The central evidential question is whether behaviour requires representing another's mental state, or can be explained by learned relationships among observable actions, contexts and outcomes.

Goal attribution has support from experiments distinguishing similar outcomes produced by different actions. Chimpanzees responded differently to a person who was unwilling to transfer food and one who was willing but unable: they persisted differently and left earlier in the unwilling condition. ^[ref] Holding the absence of food transfer broadly constant prevents the explanation that any unrewarded trial produces the same reaction. The contrast supports sensitivity to the organization or apparent purpose of actions. However, differences in movement and affect remain observable cues, so the finding need not imply a fully explicit concept of intention. Generalization to new obstacles and action sequences is a stronger test than repeating familiar signals.

Visual perspective taking concerns another individual having a different view. When dominant and subordinate chimpanzees competed for food, subordinates preferentially obtained food to which they had better visual access. Giving the subordinate a headstart forced its choice before the dominant's approach could reveal the answer, reducing a straightforward movement-following explanation. ^[ref] Such controls support tracking of another's visual access. They do not show that the subject represents every aspect of how the scene looks to the other animal; access to an object is a narrower problem than its appearance from a different viewpoint.

The distinction extends from seeing to knowing. An animal can potentially remember whether another witnessed hiding even after neither currently sees the food. Controlled competitive tasks found chimpanzees sensitive to knowledge versus ignorance, yet not successful in closely related false-belief conditions. ^[ref] Knowledge attribution therefore has stronger support in those tasks than an unrestricted ability to predict action from mistaken beliefs. Negative performance is not proof of incapacity: memory, inhibitory demands, motivation and task comprehension may limit the response. But a positive result for knowledge should not be relabelled a positive result for belief simply because both are social.

Bird studies provide evidence beyond primates. Ravens that had experienced a peephole altered cache-protection behaviour when a potential observer could be heard but not seen. The use of recorded sounds removed an actual competitor's gaze and movements as immediate guides, and the manipulation of available visual access made the test more informative than comparison of merely occupied and empty rooms. ^[ref] This supports generalization from access conditions to a possible observer. It remains possible to model performance through learned relations between openings, sounds and risk; novel transfer tests are needed to distinguish how abstractly the bird represents “being seen”.

Experience with one's own actions can also change responses to others. Scrub jays with previous pilfering experience showed stronger re-caching responses after having been observed caching. ^[ref] One interpretation is projection of the bird's own pilfering experience onto a potential competitor. Another is acquisition of a more general rule about cache vulnerability. The finding makes prior experience a causal candidate and suggests a relation between self and other, but it does not establish that the bird consciously imagines another individual's intentions. Observed and unobserved caching, prior experience and the opportunity to relocate food all need to be distinguished.

False-belief understanding sets a particularly demanding criterion: the subject must predict an agent using information that the subject knows is wrong. In great apes, an anticipatory looking paradigm found looks towards the location where an agent falsely believed an object remained, even when the subject had seen the object's removal. ^[ref] This bypasses some demands of an active food-choice response. Yet gaze towards a previously attended location can also arise from action prediction, attentional cues or associations with where an actor last saw an object. Anticipation is therefore evidence about prediction, whose representational basis needs further controls.

A subsequent experiment manipulated the ape's own experience of a barrier that looked the same from a distance but was either opaque or translucent. All subjects then watched the same test actions. Those with the opaque experience were more likely to anticipate the actor searching according to the outdated location. ^[ref] Because the visible test behaviour was held constant, an explanation relying only on a difference in the actor's immediate behaviour was weakened. The result supports transfer from self-experience to another's informational situation. It still leaves questions about the breadth of the represented belief: a limited model of visual registration and action expectation may succeed without the flexible propositional reasoning characteristic of human language.

Taken together, positive anticipatory-looking results and negative active-choice results need not be forced into a single yes/no answer. The tasks measure different outputs and impose different demands. Stronger evidence would show the same individuals generalizing across novel agents, objects and routes of access, distinguishing true belief, false belief and ignorance while physical events, attention and rewards are controlled. Eye-tracking analyses should specify regions and timing in advance, report the subjects who produce no usable anticipatory look, and avoid inferring population-wide competence solely from a selected subset of trials. Replication and uncertainty around effects matter especially with small captive samples.

The relation to self-representation is similarly componential. Using one's experience of a transparent barrier to predict another's access suggests some correspondence between self and other. It does not demonstrate an autobiographical self or reflection on one's own beliefs. Metacognition, such as selective information seeking when knowledge is missing, concerns monitoring one's own processing and is not equivalent to attributing knowledge to somebody else. Mirror self-recognition concerns one's body and is neither a necessary consequence nor a sufficient demonstration of belief attribution. These distinctions prevent a visually based test from becoming a universal scale of mentality.

The defensible conclusion is a mosaic: animals can track goals and access, some experiments support knowledge attribution and belief-sensitive predictions, and the most elaborate interpretation remains contested. The experiments constrain possible representations of self and others; their value lies in progressively excluding alternatives, rather than naming a mental state after any apparently intelligent social response.

A psychology researcher develops and tests explanations of behavior and mental processes. The work can involve experiments, repeated observation, psychometrics or explicit computational models. A useful research question separates the observed response from its proposed cause: for example, repeated self-rated confidence measures a report, while predicting which decisions are correct tests another aspect of metacognition. ^[ref]

Stephen M. Fleming studies metacognition, including computational accounts of how people evaluate decisions. With Nathaniel D. Daw, he formulated self-evaluation as an inference about a decision system that is related to, but distinguishable from, the system generating the choice. This framework can represent differences between task performance and subjective confidence, turning a verbal claim about self-awareness into predictions about observable choices and confidence reports. ^[ref]

Thomas O. Nelson contributed to cognitive psychology through work on metacognition and the accuracy of judgments of learning. With John Dunlosky, he studied how the delay before a judgment and the information available at judgment affect prediction of later remembering. Separating prediction from subsequent recall allows researchers to test which cues support useful monitoring, rather than equating high predicted success with good human memory. ^[ref]