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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.

Estimating aspects of one's own cognition, such as whether an answer is correct or whether material can later be recalled. Metacognitive monitoring should be distinguished from metacognitive control, which changes behaviour in response to such estimates.

Metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control applied to memory encoding, memory retention and memory retrieval. Different judgments predict different outcomes; a prediction of future recall need not agree with confidence in an answer currently retrieved.

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.

The strongest cross-species comparison concerns a function: using information about the reliability of one's cognition to regulate behaviour. Metacognitive monitoring can influence whether an individual answers, seeks more information or declines a test. Humans can additionally give verbal explanations, but a verbal report is neither necessary for adaptive uncertainty control nor sufficient proof of an accurate account of its mechanism.

Robert R. Hampton tested two rhesus macaques with images on a monitor. After viewing a sample and waiting through a delay, the monkeys sometimes chose whether to accept a memory test before seeing its alternatives. Correct tests yielded a preferred reward, errors none, and declining a smaller guaranteed reward. Accepted tests were more accurate than forced tests, and declining increased when memory was experimentally weakened. The two animals did not meet every condition equally clearly.^[ref] Separating the acceptance decision from the test display reduces explanations based solely on the visible test alternatives. It does not make the animal's subjective experience directly observable.

A complementary demonstration used auditory-duration discrimination in rats, with an option to decline difficult tests. A noise lasted between two and eight seconds; illuminated nose-poke apertures signalled whether a test could be accepted or declined, and two levers then represented the duration categories. A correct test earned six food pellets, an error none, and declining three.^[ref] The opportunity to avoid an error is an operational measure of uncertainty regulation, but interpreting the same behaviour requires comparing metacognitive and simpler learning models. A stimulus near the trained category boundary can acquire a low response value, making an uncertainty option attractive without an explicit representation of knowing.

The optimal confidence threshold for an uncertainty response clarifies a further issue. If correct testing earns $r$, an error earns zero and declining earns $s$, an individual maximizing the expected value of reward should accept when $pr>s$, where $p$ is its estimated probability of being correct. Identical beliefs can therefore produce different opt-out behaviour when reward size, risk preference or opportunity cost differs. Species comparisons must match or model these contingencies, as well as motivation, sensory ability and task experience.

More diagnostic tests use novel stimuli or task transfer, omitted study samples, memory manipulations not fully predictable from external cues, and conditions that separate delay, retrieval strength and reinforcement history. Different candidate models should predict held-out behaviour. Information seeking when uncertainty cannot be resolved by repeating a familiar action is especially useful. No single control eliminates all first-order alternatives; converging tests constrain them progressively.

Human advantages plausibly include language-supported explanation, explicit general beliefs about one's abilities, instruction-driven strategies and social communication of confidence. These are hypotheses about particular components, not a licence to infer a categorical absence of uncertainty monitoring in every nonhuman species. Human verbal judgments also use learned cues and can be miscalibrated. Current experiments support specific functional parallels in monitoring and control, while the equivalence of reflective awareness, domain generality and subjective experience remains a separate question.