Frankish & Evans (2009). The duality of mind: An historical perspective

Frankish, Keith, & Evans, Jonathan St B. T. (2009). The duality of mind: An historical perspective. In J. S. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds : dual processes and beyond (pp. 1-35). Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Lord... apparently... the system 1 and 2 can be trace all the way back to Mr. Plato... 8-O

(Never would I be able to make the association myself.)

1. Freud: System 1--> id; system 2--> ego.  
2. Gestalt psychology: "we can see here an anticipation of contemporary applications of dual-process theory, in which System 2 thinking is seen as necessary to intervene upon default, habitual System 1 thinking, in order for people to solve problems of an abstract or novel nature." (P. 11)
3. the origin of modern dual-process theories is sometimes cited as stemming from the distinction between controlled and automatic processes in attention made by Schnieder and Shiffrin (1977; also, Shiffrin and Schneider 1977)

After the historical perspectives, on the dawn of the Dual System theory

"The terms ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’ were coined by Stanovich (1999), but the dual-system theory 

was devised by a combination of authors, and has much earlier origins." (p. 18)

1. "Epstein (1994) proposed an integration of Freudian and cognitive ideas about the unconscious. Among contemporary dual-process theorists he is unusual, if not unique, in crediting the Freudian dual-process distinction between primary and secondary process thinking, and also in firmly attaching emotional processing to what has now become known as System 1." (p. 19)
2. "Evans and Over (1996) developed the notion of implicit and explicit cognitive systems, drawing upon the evolutionary ideas of Reber... consciousness gives us the possibility to deal with novelty and anticipate the future.’ The most distinctive aspect of Evans and Over’s contribution, perhaps, is their emphasis on the idea of hypothetical thinking, which requires imagination of possibilities and mental simulations and the ability to decouple suppositions from actual beliefs. This kind of thinking they argued to be distinctively human and to require the recently evolved, second cognitive system." (p. 20)
3. "Sloman’s (1996) proposal of two systems of reasoning, described as associative and rule-based respectively." (p. 20)
4. "Keith Stanovich (1999; 2004; this volume), who coined the terms ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’... he suggests that much educational effort must be devoted to developing System 2 thinking skills. He also suggests that, uniquely among animals, we have a cognitive system (2) on a ‘long-leash’ from the genes, which allows us to rebel and pursue our goals as individuals, and not necessarily those programmed by evolution. " (p. 20)

"The biological brain, Dennett claims, is a collection of specialized hardwired subsystems, operating in parallel and competing for control of action. The conscious mind, on the other hand, is a virtual machine, which we create for ourselves by engaging in various learned behaviours — principally habits of 

private speech, either overt or silent... By engaging in private speech, Dennett argues, we effectively reprogram our biological brains, causing their parallel machinery to mimic the behaviour of a serial computer." (p. 26)

"In the case of utterances, Carruthers argues, such rehearsal generates auditory feedback (inner speech) that is processed by the speech comprehension subsystem and tends to produce effects at the modular level appropriate to the thoughts the utterances express. Since utterances may combine outputs from different modules, this implements a form of domain general thinking, and cycles of mental rehearsal create a flexible domain general reasoning system, using only the basic resources of a modular mind equipped with a language faculty." (P. 26-27) 

Anyone ever wonder why I do so much self-talk... my VM ware at work, I guess... 8-O lol

Carruthers (2009) An architecture for dual reasoning

Carruthers, Peter. (2009). An architecture for dual reasoning. In J. S. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds : dual processes and beyond (pp. 109-128). Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

An attempt made by Carruthers to clarify the notion of System 1 and System 2.

"System 2 is realized in cycles of operation of System 1."

This expert opinion seems to be in line with my mumble jumbles...

Efklides (2006). Metacognition and affect: What can metacognitive experiences tell us about the learning process?

Affect is never my domain since my background is more in cognition... did get something out of this paper... the impact of affect on the processing at the meta and object level (as per the language of Nelson and Narens).

Efklides, Anastasia. (2006). Metacognition and affect: What can metacognitive experiences tell us about the learning process? Educational Research Review, 1(1), 3-14. 

"What I shall try to show is that metacognitive experiences and, especially, metacognitive feelings, have a dual character, that is, a cognitive and an affective one.

1. The facets of metacognition

"Fuzziness in the conceptualization of the term "metacognition" (Flavell, 1987)"

"There are two basic manifestations of the monitoring function, namely, metacognitive knowledge [MK] and metacognitive experience.  Metacognitive skills or use of strategies, on the other hand, are manifestations of the control function."

Please see the following for the facets of metacognition and their manifestation.

"[MK] also comprise knowledge of the criteria of validity of knowledge, what is being called "epistemic cognition.  One could argue that theory of mind is also an instance of MK, although the theorists in the field do not make this connection."

"Metacognitive skills (MS) is procedural knowledge... part of the so called 'executive process' or 'metacognitive strategies... self-regulation cannot be reduced to MS.'"

"The critical question for application of MS, however, is how does the person know when s/he needs to apply MS... Metacognitive experiences (ME) comprise metacognitive feelings and metacognitive judgments/estimates that are based on the monitoring of task-processing feature and/or of its outcome.  They also involve online task-specific knowledge."

"ME are present in working memory... and they can be affectively charged.-- in the case of metacognitive feeling... products of the monitoring of good functioning and have the quality of pleasant and unpleasant.  Thus, metacognitive feelings inform the person about a feature of cognitive processing, but they do it in an experiential way... in the form of a feeling, such as feeling ofknowing, feeling of confidence, etc."

"Metacognitive feelings and metacognitive judgments [e.g., feeling of knowing] are products of nonanalytic, nonconscious inferential processes, particularly when there are conditions that do not allow full analysis of the situation."

"A person working on a learning task... negative affect, be it feeling of difficulty or feeling of dissatisfaction, calls for control decisions.  The control decisions can be triggered automatically, without conscious awareness, or consciously through the analysis of the situation based on one's MK."

"Experts right from  the beginning of task processing identify the critical task features and information, whereas novices refer to superficial task characteristics irrelevant to the procedures needed to deal with the task."

2. Metacognitive experience

Feeling of difficulty is the product of the interaction of factors including the affective factors, such as mood.

3. Metacognitive experiences and affect

"ME monitor the progress being made towards one's goal and they convey this information in an affective or cognitive manner... information can trigger the affective regulatory loop and/or the cognitive one, thus guiding the self-regulatory process in both the short and the long run."

"at least in specific types of task, cognition and emotion co-exist in the processing of information and regulation of behavior.  Furthermore, there is growing neuropsychological evidence that the anterior cingulate cortex is associated with the regulation of both cognitive emotional processing.  This is exactly the area also involved in metacognitive processes."

Keep on seeing anterior cingulate cortex
When all focused on cognitive work, I can be a major league bitch from hell
When emotionally charged and being angry, I can not bring myself back down
Life before hospitalization is one emotionally charged event after another, possibly all dedicated to emotion and cognition... nothing left for metacognition especially in the psychotic department of metacognition.

"One theory that links affect with "meta-" level processes and explains the role of affect in the regulation of cognition is the one proposed by Carver and Scheier (1998) and Carver (2003).  This theory posits two basic types of feedback loop: one feedback loop informs on the attainment of one's goal, whereas the second monitor the rate of the progress towards one's goal.  This is a metalevel feedback loop that manifest subjectively as affect and as a hazy sense of expectancy... positive feelings... inform that there is a discrepancy in the positive direction and, therefore, effort can be reduced.  This easing on effort brings back the system to the dired rate of progress towards the focal goal and, at the same time, frees resources to be invested in the achievement of other possible goals."

"... one possible reason is that negative affect limits the available resources to be invested in the task, so no extra effort was allocated to it."

But how?  That's my question.

"Positive and negative affect, through their interaction with ME, have an immediate affect on the self-regulation of ongoing activity as well as on the person's emotions that endorse engagement with or disengagement from one's goal."

Affect-->Monitoring-->Control
or in me...
Affect-->tie it all up and can't let go of existing processes, cognitively or affectively-->failure to perform task switch (meta, executive)--> possibly simply jammed up the processing power and could it be an indication of the insufficient power of metacognition.

5. Implications for the learning process

"if students rely completely on ready made answers for the solution of problems or on other people's help for dealing with a task, then they do not capitalize on their ME, they do not elaborate on the source of difficulty, and they do not associate their ME with strategies or with procedural knowledge that can resolve the problem they face.  Thus students do not "learn" from their ME and cannot regulate their figure behavior and action successfully."

Learning to live with psychosis is like learning to walk or learning to ride a bicycle.  You simply have to do it and you can't pretend the outcome without going through the motions.

6. Conclusion

"ME are transitory and highly sensitive to person, task, situation and context effects, redering them highly variable.  As a consequence, the information they convey is not always accurate, or may go unnoticed or, even, be misinterpreted.  This implies that one has to "learn" the meaning of his/her ME and understand the conditions that give rise to them if s/he is to be in charge of his/her cognition."

Before anyone else... learn about thyself.

"It seems that increased knowledge and expertise in a domain lead to better calibration of the ME."

The domain of psychosis... the dual-reality world?

As Paris (2002) pointed out, metacognition can be helpful, benign, or debilitating.

Tell me about it... me and my out-of-whack metacognition!  lol sigh

Muñoz (2010). Metarepresentational Versus Control Theories of Metacognition

Muñoz, Santiago Arango. (2010). Metarepresentational Versus Control Theories of Metacognition. Paper presented at the Metacognition for Robust Social Systems.1. Two theories of metacognition

1.1 Metarepresentational theory of metacognition

The necessary structure of metacognitive judgments is composed by

1. a proposition (e.g., "it rains")
2. a first-order attitude directed to that representation such as believing or intending, denoted by a mental concept
3. a second-order attitude, namely a metacognitive judgment, directed to the first order attitude (2) and its proposition (1) (Proust, 2007)

In other words, the content of a second-order representation is necessarily constituted by the self-attribution of a mental concept together with a first-order representation

[3] I believe that [2] I know (or Perceive, believe, feel, etc.) that [1] it rains.

From an epistemological point of view, there should be almost no difference between the knowledge that a subject has about herself and her knowledge about others because both are based on the similar behavioral cues, use the same conceptual resources to make inferences and are produced by the same cognitive mechanism.

Years of learning to think as a psychotic, epistemologically similar or not, I do have problems understand how normal people think and I don't care no more since it ain't like I can afford to think like them... because they have too much slack that I don't have... Like when they make mistakes in thinking, they simply make mistakes, misatribution and misinterpretation; for someone psychotic like me, the consequences are more dire, consequences have consequences and the out-of-bound can have serious real life impacts.  More useful to figure out how I can think to survive in a sea of symptoms.  

1.2. Control theory of metacognition

"The control view on metacognition claims that it is mainly a capacity to evaluate and control our cognitive processes and mental dispositions by means of mental simulation.  In Joelle Proust's words: "The aim is, rather, to evaluate one's present mental dispositions, endorse them, and form epistemic and conative commitments" (Proust, 2009b)... subjects do not need to form a second-order representation about their first order attitudes in order to evaluate and control them."

Two levels of metacognition

"While metarepresentation theorists accuse control theorists of putting too much weight on a sub-personal mechanism, a"gate-keeping mechanism" (Carruthers, 2008, 2009a), control theorists accuse the former of over-intellectualizing a more basic phenomenon (Proust, 2007, 2009c).

"no real disagreement between both theories because they are trying to explain different phenomena."

2.1 High-level: Theory-based metacognition

1. Some mental concepts that permit her to self-attribute mental states
2. a language in which to formulate her judgments
3. a theory of mind, understood as a set of beliefs concerning the functioning of the mind and allowing her to make inferences.

The subject needs a mindreading capacity to self-ascribe mental states.

System 2--characterized as being slow, analytic, controlled and conscious.

Subjects interpret their behavior and make inferences thanks to a theory of mind they posses.

The mental model of how my mind works-->though just because it's empirically useful doesn't mean it's the "true value."

"metacognitive beliefs and theories are not just "faux-thoughts," they do play an important role in the production of behavior."

My unviolated belief that I am psychotic

the main cognitive function of high-level metacognition is interpretive... subjects may often be wrong in their self-interpretative judgments about their own propositional attitudes and cognitive capacities."

"People can be easily deluded concerning the content of their memory since "recognition or direct questioning can have 'contaminating' effects on memory" (Loftus, 1989)

Eyewitness testimony research... memory issue.

"People seem to hold false theories about their memory or their perception."

Tell yours psychotic about it.  Therefore, all could be false with one inviolatable... I am psychotic.

Subjects do not rely on such theories or confabulations to control their cognitive behaviour.  In other words, what they believe they do and what they actually do are not consistent.

Why did DWM got taken down shall I know that I was psychotic?

"many of the reasoning biases, such as the belief bias or the myside bias, are actually caused by the subjects' propensity to accept uncritically (i.e., without an analysis or revision by S2) a heuristic response.

Reasoning bias--> all that has came out of my front door.... interesting.  One reason why I can't do a "qualitative analysis" on my own documentation... similar bias all the way... durchfallen.

2.2 Low-level: experience-based metacognition

Feelings are one kind of output of what cognitive psychologists have called System 1 adn which has been characterized as being fast, based on heuristics, mostly automatic and unconscious.

Symptom schema-->partial matching

"The feeling itself is metacognitive in the sense of being directed towards a mental disposition (knowledge, uncertainty, ignorance, etc.), but the content of the epistemic feeling that determines decision-making is non-conceptual and thus not metarepresentational."

"Low-level metacognition is the capacity of a being 

• to entertain epistemic feelings that nonconceptually point to mental dispositions and
• to be able to exploit such feelings in order to control its cognitive activities

3. Interactions, mechanisms and advantages of the two-level account

3.1 Interactions between the two levels

• high-level: I am psychotic
• Low-level: Tactics

The author provided 3 examples of the possible interactions.  

I find the third one most "familiar" or "similar to my case.

"When subjects inhibit their propensity to rely on the feelings of familiarity after they are given a theory concerning the unreliability of the feeling."

The theory of the unreliability of the products of my head.

3.2 One or two mechanisms?

The first possibility would imply that high-level metacognition (mindreading) is grounded on low-level metacognition, as the simulation theorist hold... 

Without the onset and the setbacks in my mental status throughout the years, to be honest, the System 2 theory of I am psychotic would be even more incomplete.

"evidence of differences in the bases of metacognitive judgments about self and other."

This is why the scope of the discussion is about mes, myselves, and Is... scoping... think it might be part of the research methodology 101 they taught me in school.

The second possibility is that both levels are distinct mechanisms that have evolved in virtue of different evolutionary pressures to carry out different cognitive functions.

3.3 Some advantages of the two-level account

This is how it might have worked for me--the interaction between system 2 and system 1... though chicken and egg... after the onset, system 2 might be the prerequisite of the system 1 development.

Why did I falter? A combination of system 2 and system 1... with the worst sin... a relaxed attitude at System 2... though, unfortunately, I can produce no evidence to substantiate this postulation.

Shall I falter again, why would it be?  A combination of system 2 and system 1.

Shimamura (2000). The role of the prefrontal cortex in dynamic filtering

Shimamura, Arthur P. (2000). The role of the prefrontal cortex in dynamic filtering. Psychobiology, 28(2), 207-218.

"four prominent aspects of executive control--selecting, maintaining, updating, and rerouting information process. These four aspects are couched in terms of dynamic filtering theory, which proposes that the prefrontal cortex acts as a selective gating or filtering mechanism that controls information processing."

"Lesions in the ventral region produce an abnormal perseveration of central sets.  A hallmark feature of this deficit is an inability to shift sets in object reversal and go/no-go tasks.  In such tasks, the animal must inhibit an incorrect but dominant response tendency.  In human studies, set-shifting tasks have been used to assess the ability to disengage from one tasks and perform another."

For instance, being delusional--self-centric, everything is about mes, myselves, and Is--is a dominant response tendency... hard wired.  

"Neuropsychological studies of patients with frontal lobe lesions and functional neuroimaging studies of neurologically intact individuals suggest that the dorsolateral region is involved in tasks that require various control processes, such as stimulus selection, working memory, memory retrieval, and set shifting.  Executive control is presumed to enable top-down "supervision" of cognitive processing at various stages, such as perceptual analysis, short-term memory, and response selection."

Aspects of executive control

Selecting activity and focusing attention

"Selective attention refers to the focusing of attention to perceptual features or to information in memory."

1. Stroop-like effect
2. Flanker task

"It may be that perceptual or response filtering is less a purview of the prefrontal cortex and is more associated with the anterior cingulate cortex.  Perhaps, selection of information in working memory may be more rooted in prefrontal processing.  In summary, neuropsychological of the anterior cingulate cortex in filtering perceptual or response modes, and there is some evidence for a contributory role of the prefrontal cortex in supporting these functions."

The question I have is... sensory memory is theoretically a store only... nothing gets manipulated.  Bearing in mind Chi's notion or "meta or not," where only second-order is only considered meta.  Wouldn't it make it sound like the executive control is but simple executive control?  Or, if thinking of it the other way, the executive control comes out of the box (sensory memory), from the perspective of the box, that should be meta enough?

Maintaining activity in short-term memory

"Smith et al. found increased left-hemisphere activation for object short-term memory [BA 37], but increased right-hemisphere activation for spatial short-term memory [BA 40]."

"Separate pathways for spatial and object information processing... though it is important to note that both separation and integration of these cortical streams may be critical for executive control."

Updating activity: manipulation of information in short-term memory

"Updating concerns the ability to alter activity levels among items in short-term memory.  Thus, rather than merely maintaining activity, updating involves top-down reorganization of activation levels."
"Failure to monitor and update information leads to perseverations."

Could my perseverance with this DWM book thing be an indicator of the failure to update? 8-O lol sigh

"Efficient learning involves the reorganization of sensory information into meaningful or conceptual representations.  This process requires the integration of new information with existing knowledge.  As such, learning must involve updating and organization of both sensory information and existing knowledge."

Albeit my difficulties in learning in general, my new psychotic symptoms apparently have no difficulty integrating themselves with the old ones stored in LTM... independent of my contribution... almost reaching the state of automaticity... I guess. 8-X

Sources memory...

I could never remember author names, years, and also have problems with terminologies... though I know the concept... even before my psychotic years...  

"Findings from both neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies suggest that the prefrontal cortex is prominently involved in both short-term and long-term memory tasks that involve the updating of memory activations.  In these tasks, it is necessary to rearrange or modulate the level of activations in short-term memory."

Rerouting activity: implementing set shifting

"One aspect that makes rerouting a particularly complex executive function is the need to disengage from and shift to different processing modes... Such internally mediated or volitional shifts in processing may be particularly demanding on executive control processes.  Indeed, rerouting requires shifts in stimulus activations, stimulus processing, and response programming.  As such, it represents one of the most complex forms of executive control."

When reading this section, I thought of the notion of ADL and IADL.  Sure, disruption in the ability to reroute activity/plan switching is an indicator of my head not working too well.  Yet, when is the head most disabled?  When you are struggling with the most basic task... attention.  In a sense, singing Diva's Lament about the inability to reroute from the dominant set called the delusional mental model?  Call it a blessing. 

Dynamic Filtering Theory: A theoretical account of Prefrontal Function

"At the cognitive level, such terms as central executive and supervisor suggest a rather intelligent control mechanism that oversees and manages information processing."

"It is proposed here, that the prefrontal cortex operates as a dynamic filtering mechanism that maintains selected neural activations and gates extraneous or irrelevant ones.  According to this view, at any given moment cortical and subcortical activations involved in sensory and cognitive functioning produce a cacophony of neural signals. The prefrontal cortex, with its extensive projections to and from many cortical and subcortical regions, orchestrates these signals by means of a filtering mechanism that inhibits some signals and maintains activation of others.  In essence, the prefrontal cortex acts to refine activity and increase signal-to noise ratios.  This mechanism may be particularly involved in inhibiting or damping extraneous activity, or "noise." under conditions of extensive interferences."

"Dynamic filtering theory suggests that activation in the posterior cortex initiates a pattern of associated activations in the prefrontal cortex.  By way of reciprocal projections back to the posterior regions, this pattern of activation enables certain neuronal ensembles to be kept active and others to be gated or inhibited.  This mechanism affords a means by which information processing in the posterior cortex can be maintained and modulated by signals from the prefrontal cortex.  Without prefrontal control, the system is subject to greater noise from extraneous activations."

Noise is an interesting concept.  Take my auditory hallucination for instance... the voices could get so busy at work that there is no moment of quietness.  Then, think about it... how does it work... the tuning down of the voices through meds or my blocking the voices in the back of my head (when possible)?  Like what was spoken before... something like at which level does the message get lost or distorted because of the noise--with the message as the reality shared by the others and the noise, psychotic version of reality?  What and where is the threshold etc.?

"Efficient temporal processing may require the clipping of recent active information as a way to segregate neural processing from one moment to another... reflecting an inhibitory signal back... a neural "inhibition of return," which could facilitate attentional shift.  Without this simple control, the system might be subject to perseverations of recent activation."

"Perhaps through experience, we acquire not only a vast amount of knowledge but also a multitude of filters that enable the selection of that knowledge."

"The word animals would not only activate representations in posterior cortical areas but also activate filters in the prefrontal cortex, which then would select, maintain, and modulate associated posterior activations."

Similar to the notion of security software.

"aspects of selection may involve modality-specific processing (e.g., sensory processes), whereas updating and rerouting involve polymodal processing"

Executive Control Process	Related Concept	Benchmark Task	Filtering Mechanism
Activation
Selecting	Selective attention	Stroop	Filter selection
Maintaining	Short-term memory	Digital span	Filter persistence
Manipulation
Updating	Monitoring	n-back	Filter switch-stimulus
Rerouting	Set shifting	Task switching	Filter switch-response

"The notion of selection is less controversial than the notion of active inhibition.  However, some physiological evidence suggest that the prefrontal cortex engages inhibitory control of posterior cortical activity.  Knight and colleagues studied event-related potentials (ERPs) in patients with dorsolateral prefrontal lesions.  In one study, the amplitude of evoked responses presumed to be generated in the primary auditory cortex was potentiated in patients with prefrontal lesions.  Thus, there appeared to be a disinhibition of posterior cortical activity as a result of a frontal lobe lesion."

Hello, World!  My auditory hallucinations!

Regardless the experts' general opinions on inhibition, there is something to the notion of inhibition.  There is a qualitative difference between simply amplifying the signals to attend on and with the amplification coupling with signal inhibition... if what I perceive is the manifestation of inhibition.

Since the notion of Central executive is in the context of working memory and, as mentioned earlier, sensory memory only a store, does this make this executive control worth the meta tag?

"This inhibitory control mechanism may filter or gate sensory information at very early stages of processing."

"Prefrontal regions are performing the same neural function--dynamic filtering--but different behavioral outcomes occur because different prefrontal regions are filtering different posterior cortical regions, which themselves serve different cognitive functions."

"Filtering problems may occur at many levels of information processing, including sensory processing, memory activation, and response selection.  At the level of sensory processing, prefrontal (and anterior cingulate) function may involve the selection and maintenance of sensory signals."

"Demands on dynamic filtering will occur to the extend that irrelevant activations intrude on information processing, such as in tasks involving dominant responses that must be inhibited.  In fact, the ability to inhibit previously dominant memory activation is an important feature of prefrontal control."

How I am wrong.

Emotional control and orbitofrontal cortex    

Metacognition and affect

Dynamic filtering theory in relation to other views

"Dynamic filtering theory offers a neural-based mechanism that enables top-down control of information processing.  This view builds on earlier theories of prefrontal functions... Baddeley's characterization of working memory and the central executive emphasizes activation and maintenance of information in short-term memory... Dynamic filtering theory is consistent with these views in suggesting that the prefrontal cortex is involved in selecting and maintaining activation in short-term memory."

Thank God... thought my low-latent inhibited head was seeing Central Executive... till I see it put down in black and white by the author himself... lol

"Mid-ventrolateral regions are presumed to be involved in first-order executive control processes associated with selection and maintenance of short-term memory.  Mid-dorsolateral regions act as second-order executive processes involved in monitoring and manipulation."

"However, there may be even further, more detailed ways to define the manner in which filtering can affect information processing."

"In terms of behavioral outcome, it is extremely difficult to differentiate a model based purely on selection from a model based on both selection and inhibition.  In the end, the two models can often lead to similar behavioral outcomes."

Again, from the psychotic perspective, there is a qualitative difference although, out of the mouth of a thought-disordered psychotic, a paradoxical notion.

Adaptive resonance theory: analogous to center-on, surround-off receptive fields.

How I am wrong... center on, surround also on.

Shimamura (2000). Toward a Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition

A paper touching upon the question I have between Baddeley's central executive and the control department of metacognition.

Shimamura, Arthur P. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition. Consciousness and Cognition, 9(2), 313-323.

"There is considerable convergence of issues associated with metacognition, executive control, working memory, and frontal lobe function." (p. 313)

Metacognition and aspects of executive control

"Fernandez-Duque et all. review findings from basic cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology.  These findings suggest a strong relationship between metacognitive regulation and executive control  They emphasize the biological bases of metacognition and suggest that midfrontal brain region are part of a neural circuit that enables metacognitive regulation." (p. 131)

"There is evidence to suggest that the frontal cortex contributes to metacognition." (p. 314)--similar to central executive.

"investigations of executive control have assessed and defined specific components--such as selecting stimulus information, maintaining information in working memory, and manipulating information processing...  The linking of metacognition to aspects of executive control offers opportunities to define better cognitive components of metacognition.

"As suggested by Fernandez-Duque et al., supervisory models, such as the one proposed by Norman and Shallice (1986) and integrated in Baddeley's model of working memory (Baddeley, 1986), have features that resemble metacognitive control.  In particular, both metacognitive control and executive control share the primary feature of enabling top-down modulation of cognitive process." (p. 315)

"Executive control can be defined as processes involved in the selection, activation, and manipulation of information in working memory.  In terms of the Nelson-Narens model, object-level information that is being monitored is in working memory, and top-down control of that information involves meta-level control." (p. 315)

Aspects of executive control and Dynamic Filtering Theory (p. 316)

Executive process	Related concept	Benchmark task
Selecting	Selective attention	Stroop
Maintaining	Short-term memory	Digit span
Updating	Monitoring	n-back
Rerouting	Set shifting	Task switching

"Rerouting involves a global shift of information processing--from stimulus registration to response selection." (p. 317) Task/plan switching

"patients with frontal lobe lesions have difficulty rerouting process from a previously successful or dominant set to a new set."
Albeit the differential etiology, I know what it means to have difficulty rerouting a dominant processing (paranoid delusional with grandiosity) to a new one.

Theories of executive control and frontal lobe function

"Metcalfe's CHARM model (Metcalfe, 1993)... metacognitive evaluations, such as feelings of knowing, are based on a familiarity check that is computed between new information and what is already stored in memory." (p. 318)

"in terms of behavioral outcome, it is extremely difficult to differentiate the selection of appropriate responses from the inhibition of inappropriate responses." (p. 319)
Look into the psychotic population... you will know how important inhibition is...

"There is, however, some physiological evidence to suggest that the prefrontal cortex is involved in inhibiting activation in posterior cortex.  Knight et al. (1989) showed that patients with frontal lobe lesions exhibit posterior evoked potentials that are greater than those observed in control subjects.  That is, sensory evoked potentials appeared to be disinhibited as a result of frontal lobe damage."

Concluding remarks
"Fernandez-Duque et al. integrate emotional and cognitive regulation in their analysis of metacognition."-- cognitive and emotion."

"increased activation in the anterior cingulate for both cognitive regulation and emotional regulation.  It is unclear, however, whether this brain region serves all forms of task setting or selective attention or whether there is some special link between emotional and cognitive control." (p. 320)

As of 2000... wonder things might have changed since?

"To what extent can issues of emotional regulation be linked to metacognitive research?  Perhaps, as suggested by Fernandez-Duque et al, the same brain activations involved in emotional regulation are also involved in cognitive regulation.  Another possibility is that different areas in frontal cortex control different forms of processing.  In other words, there are various metalevel systems that monitor and control different aspects of information processing." (p. 320)

Flavell (1987). Speculations about the nature and development of metacognition

Pensive coffee drinker quietly reading the book...
(not yours think-aloud self talker. lol 8-X)

This article is the reason why I landed on the book "Metacognition, motivation, and understanding" and the last one to go through.  Although this book dated back to 1987, it gave me an absolute amount of updates on topics relating to metacogntion.

This article resolved two issues I was pulling my hair off for due to my ignorance and during the time when my cuckoo head wouldn't allow me to touch the literature...

First, the cognition of cognition is called metacognition.   What about affect?  Meta-affect? 8-O Apparently, Flavell had explicated that the concept could be broadened to include anything psychological.

 Second, given the linkage between automaticity and unconsciousness (no need for efforts), with extensive practices, could metacognitive monitoring and regulation reach automaticity? Apparently, it's not a useless question my tangential head entertains only since so postulated Flavell... "researchers may eventually feel compelled to include processes that are not conscious and perhaps not even accessible to consciousness as forms of metacognition or metacognitive-like phenomena."

Flavell, John H. (1987). Speculations about the nature and development of metacognition. In F. E. Weinert & R. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp. 21-29). Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

"Metacognition is usually defined as knowledge and cognition about cognitive objects, that is, about anything cognitive.  However, the concept could reasonably be broadened to include anything psychological, rather than just anything cognitive.  For instance, if one has knowledge or cognition about one's own or someone else's emotions or motives, it could be considered metacognitive." (p. 21)

Thank you.  I was gonna start another neologism called "meta-affect."

"Because some metacognitive knowledge and cognitive self-regulatory activity is not very accessible to consciousness, researchers may eventually feel compelled to include processes that are not conscious and perhaps not even accessible to consciousness as forms of metacognition or metacognitive-like phenomena."

Can metacognitive processes reach automaticity?

"Metacognitive knowledge refers to the part of one's acquired world knowledge that has to do with cognitive (or perhaps better, psychological) matters."  (p. 21)

Metacognitive Knowledge (see also Flavell, 1979)

1. Person variable: About universal, "it is hard to imagine a culture in which people grow up without acquiring any naive psychology; in particular, without developing any intuitions about the way the human mind works." (Theory of mind?)
2. Task variable
3. Strategy variables: "In the course of development one learns about cognitive strategies for making cognitive progress (e.g., adding numbers together to get the sum) and about metacognitive strategies for monitoring the cognitive progress (e.g., adding numbers together a few more times to ensure the value of the sum is correct).

"It should be emphasized that person, task, and strategy variables always interact, and that intuitions about their interaction are also acquired."

Intuition is acquired... like learned?  Implicit knowledge?  Interesting.

Metacognitive experiences (see also Flavell, 1979)

"Metacognitive experiences are conscious experiences that are cognitive and affective." (P. 24)

"Metacognitive experiences play a very important role in everyday cognitive lives.  As one grows older one learns how to interpret and respond appropriately to these experience." (p. 24)

"Younger children have more trouble than older children in properly comprehending their own feelings of incomprehension, and in properly appreciating the meaning, significance, and implications of such metacognitive experiences.

Questions, problems and issues

• "Where does metacognition fit in psychological space?  That is, what other psychological concepts does it relate to and how does it relate to these concepts?" (e.g., executive processes)
• What types of metacognition are there and what are the foundations or prerequisites of their development?  "Is the acquisition, use, and usefulness of some types of metacognition impeded by information-processing limitation or biases, by lack of relevant experiences in most environment, or by other factors?"

Changes and experiences (p. 25-26)

1. There might be cognitive-developmental changes that could lead directly to metacognitive acquisition
2. there could be changes which increase the child's cognitive readiness to profit from experiences that promote metacognitive development
3. developmental changes might increase the opportunities to experience that could lead to the acquisition of metacognitive development

An individual who can create conscious and explicit representations of the past, present, and the future should be in a better position to make metacognitive process than one who does not.

The role of experiences (p. 26)

1. Practice makes perfect
2. Practice things that are not metacognitive in nature but lead to metacognitive development

Metacognition is useful for organisms with the following properties

1. An abundance of cognition
2. Thinking is fallible and error-prone; therefore the need for monitoring and regulation (No doubt about it in me)
3. An intent to communicate, explain and justify thinking to the others and oneself
4. In order to survive or prosper
5. Need to make weighty, carefully considered decisions
6. a need or proclivity for inferring and explaining psychological events in itself and other

"However, none of us has yet come up with deeply insightful, detailed proposals about what metacognition is, how it operates, and how it develops." (p. 28)

Wow...

Brown, Ann. (1987). Metacognition, executive control, self-regulation, and other more mysterious mechanisms

This article is about the definition of metacognition... its blanket nature and fuzzy boundaries.  It and other papers in the book also addressed a question I have had since the beginning of the recent literature review process... or the difficulties I have in making linkage between Baddeley's Central Executive and the executive notion of Metacognition.  

An interesting question for myself... what it be like if I read this paper and papers alike at the beginning of the literature review phase?  The way I see it... (a hypothesis)... you can't pretend the outcome without going through the motion and you can't get the answer until you pose the question.  How true?  Donno.

Brown, Ann. (1987). Metacognition, executive control, self-regulation, and other more mysterious mechanisms. In F. E. Weinert & R. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp. 65-116). Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

"Metacognition refers to understanding of knowledge, an understanding that can be reflected in either effective use or overt description of the knowledge in question." (P. 85)

"Metacognition refers loosely to one's knowledge and control of own cognitive system.  Two primary problems with the terms are: it is often difficult to distinguish between what is meta and what is cognitive; and there are many different historical roots from which this area of inquiry developed."

Some confusions

• The interchangeability of cognitive and metacognitive functions such as in metacognition and reading. 

1. Nice quote:  "According to Dewey, learning was 'learning to think' and reading was thinking stimulated by texts."

• A second source of confusion concerning the wide spread use of the term metacognition is that, within the modern psychological literature, it has been used to refer to two distinct areas of research: knowledge about cognition and regulation of regulation.  

1. "Knowledge about cognition refers to the stable, statable, often fallible, and often late developing information that human thinkers have about their own cognitive processes." (p. 67-68) (Donno about you, I am damn sure that native psychology of mine is more than often wrong.)
2. "activities (predicting outcomes, scheduling strategies, and various forms of vicarious trial and error, etc). Prior to undertaking a problem, monitoring activities (monitoring, testing, revising, and re-scheduling one's strategies for learning) during learning; and checking outcomes (evaluating the outcome of any strategic actions against criteria of efficiency and effectiveness).  It has been assumed that these activities are relatively unstable, not necessarily statable, and relatively age independent (i.e., task and situation dependent)... Knowing how to do something does not necessarily mean that the activities can be brought to the level of conscious awareness and report on to others." (P. 68)  (I suspect that the majority of the psychotics perform symptom detection on a daily basis.  Ain't got no idea why I have to turn the 不可說 into words.  Sadomasochist, I guess.)

Roots of metacognition

In the following section, the author "four historically separate, but obviously interlinked, problems in psychology that pertain to issues of metacognition."

Verbal reports as cognitive processes

Spinoza:"... He who knows something knows at the same time that he knows it and he knows as well that he knows what he knows." (p. 70) (Wow... this can compete with "Are you sure you are sure you are sure?" lol)

Locke "till the understanding turns inwards upon itself, reflects on its own operations, and makes them the object of its own contemplation." (p. 70)

The issue on "the distinction between multiple and reflective access."

Rozin's accessibility theory

1. Intelligence components can be strictly welded to constrained domains (i.e., skills available in one situation are not readily used in others, even though they are appropriate)... though not necessarily.
2. Even if skills are widely applicable but not tightly welded, they need not be conscious statable. 

Pylyshyn

1. Multiple access refers to the ability to use knowledge flexibily because it can be systemically varied to fit a wide range of conditions, knowledge is informationally plastic.
2. Reflective access refers to the ability to "mention as well as use" the components of the system

Consensus within discrepancies: "the most stringent criteria of understanding involve the availability of knowledge to consciousness and reflection"... therefore, verbal reports as data is kosher.  

Problems associated with verbal report

1. There is the obvious problem of asking children to reliably inform on the content of their own conscious processes.
2. What one knows might not be what one does.  What is needed is a theory as to when one may expect to find a relationship between a subject's verbal reports and actions, and exactly what that relationship would be.

The context... 

1. "verbal reports are often taken in situations where the knowledge being assessed may be transient, is elicited in the face of a particular task or context, or is elicited during the actual performance of a task." (p. 73)
2. The problematic procedure to ask children to describe how they would behave in certain hypothetical situation. (p. 74)

The need to distinguish between

• predictive verbalizations
• concurrent verbalizations
• retrospective verbalization
• and specific and general information questions

Demand characteristics: Feeling compiled to be a good participants and reported to have done what the researchers asked them to do though knowing they didn't do it.

An excellent point... it's a very good question to ask, "How much is my documentation contaminated by the effects of demand characteristics albeit all due efforts to speak the truth as I see it?"  How discrepant are what's being said and what's being done since talk is cheap?  How do we catch it in ourselves?  

Reminding me of the observer effect at the quantum world... cool... (I am surely tangential... fun though... 8-O lol)

An adequate theory of the relation of verbal reports to actual performance must include some a priori predictions of when verbal reports influence performance and when they do not.  "Future research could concentrate on the specific circumstances which would result in a metacognitive-cognitive link.  Under what circumstances would one predict a positive or a negative relationship between verbal reports and performances?  (p. 75)

"The relation between "thinking aloud" and problem solving can sometimes be beneficial.  This is particularly true if the type of verbalization that is required is a statement of a rule or a reason for an action... The Gagne and smith finding (1962) findings are robust and suggest that forcing learners to make a rule explicit helps the learning process, as well as the transfer of the rule." (p. 76)

A good excuse for my incurable think-out-loud (aka talking to myself) real life practice... 8-O lol

"Verbal reports can often have a negative effect on the learning process.  This situation occurs when the requirement for overt verbalization competes for central processing capacity with the processes that must be reported....  Many current information processing models claim that with repeated practice many of the intermediate steps of both thought and action become automatized, and therefore, they are even less available to conscious introspection." (p. 76-77)

The symptoms... surely automatic... one of the reason why it's so difficult to look at the processing of the symptoms and so difficult to break it down.

Albeit inconsistencies in existing research, "greater transfer across problem isomorphs of an inferential reasoning task [was found] when, after each problem, three- and four-year-old learners were required to describe the solution to Kermitt the frog so that he could also perform the task... Questions cannot be adressed, or answered adequately, unless researchers are precise about the type of verbalization, the type of cognitive process, and the theoretical rationale for expecting a positive, negative, and neutral relation between verbalization and the cognitive process." P. 78"

Executive control within an information processing framework

"The second historical root of things metacognitive is the notion of executive control taken from the information processing models of cognition." (p. 79)

"Information-processing theories emerged in the mid-1960s along with the growing interest in computer competence and machine simulation of though.  The concurrent development of psychological models was greatly influenced by the theories and jargon of synthetic intelligence; during the past 15 years the computer metaphor has dominated theories of human cognition." (p. 79)

"The notion of executive control was in general vogue by the early 1970 (Greeno & Bjork, 1973) and was introduced into developmental psychology (Brown, 1974, 1975)." (p. 79-80)


I know a place where you can get away
It's called a dance floor, and here's what it's for so

Come on, Vogue, Vogue

Don't just stand there, let's get to it
Strike a pose,there's nothing to it 

"A two-process approach to thinking, automatic and controlled processing, predates information-processing models." (p. 80)

1. Posner and Snyder's (1974) "conscious strategies" and "automatic activation
2. Shiffrin's (1975) "controlled vs systemic processing"
3. Norman and Bobrow's (1975) "resource limited and "datalimited processing
4. Laberge's (1975) "automatic focusing
5. Brown (1975) "deliberate and involuntary" 
6. Hasher and Zack (1979) "effortful and automatic"
7. Naus and Halasz (1978) "strategic versus automatic"

"For developmental psychologists, there are many interesting questions questions concerning automatization" (p. 81)

• "a great deal of the development that occurs with increasing expertise (age) is the result of processes that were originally controlled, effortful, and laborious becoming automated."
• "processes that do not demand strategic control are efficient, even in the young, and are less sensitive to developmental changes."

Executive power: the major problems are the traditional ones of consciousness and who has it.

Norman (1980): "Consciousness is a peculiar stepchild of our discipline, agreed to be important, but little explored in research and theory.  There are legitimate reasons for this relative neglect.  This is a most difficult topic, one for which it is very difficult to get the hard, sensible evidence that experimental disciplines require... We cannot understand (thinking) until we come to a better appreciation of the working of the mind, of the several simultaneous trains of thought that can occur, of the differences between conscious and subconscious processing, of what it means to focus upon one train of thought to the exclusion of others.  What-who- does the focussing?... And what does it mean to have conscious attention?  Can there be attention that is not conscious?  What-who-experiences the result of conscious attentional processes?" (p. 81)



What is "I"?  "The ghost in the machine, the homunculus" (p. 81)? What-who? Same issue that got Baddeley pretty troubled as well ...

"Central to the issues of metacognition are computer planning models that attempts to model problem-solving behavior."  The author went on to describe 3 models and how they worked.  (p. 83)
"with increasing sophistication, information processing, and artificial intelligence models have gained more power by paying increasing attention to the 'metacognitive' aspect of thinking." (p. 85)

• preplanning and planning-in-action
• planning and control
• preaction and trouble shooting
• planning and monitoring

"The central place of executive functions, such as planning and monitoring, is asserted in most current models of human and machine information processing, and there is a dearth of clear data, developmental or otherwise, that support this assertion." (p. 85-86)

"patients with frontal-lobe syndrome... experience extraordinary difficulty with error correction... described as simultaneously preservative and distractible, a failure in intelligent focusing attributed to damage to the supervisory attentional mechanism, or executive system." (p. 87)

Though different pathology, I see similarity... error detection and symptoms (e.g., hallucination, delusion) detection.  Preservative on "self-centric notion" and easily distractible from things I intend to focus on... especially when the mental state is worst off... regardless of the psychotic age... unless simply a constant process of regressing back to the early psychotic age?

Young children's difficulty to set up plans

The fledgling me just ain't got enough beef to set up the plans?  

1. Learned?
2. Brain structure including the component of encoded memory?
3. The combination?

"In general, children have difficulty detecting inconsistencies in messages, unless those inconsistencies are particularly blatant or salient) (p. 88)

Symptom detection.

"The influence of task difficulty and familiarity must be considered in any examination of the child's propensity to plan and monitor his or her own activities." (p. 88)

Self-regulation, metaprocedural reorganization, and reflected abstraction from the Piagetian school of developmental psychology

"metacogntions... encompass regulatory functions, such as error detection and correction... The historical roots of these concepts can be found in most of the major developmental theories." (P. 89)

Piaget's theory of regulation

"for Piaget, self-regulation, error correction, trial-and-error, theory testing, etc., need not be conscious experiences, but may occur in the plane of action; however, the highest level of theory building and testing is conscious."

Conspiracy theory?  Now I know... it's my consciousness that screws my head up... 8-O lol

"Because consciousness is not directly linked to conceptualization, the child's 'reaction remain elementary, the subject is likely to distort conceptualization of what he observes, instead of recording it without modification."

Interesting notion to entertain... Reporting in DWM up to now... there seems to be some differences-- even when I was telepathic like how I was last year this time.  Though... back to the notion... "the subject is likely to distort conceptualization of what he observes."

Metaprocedural reorganization and systemization

Children's progress in theory development

1. "There is a developmental lull, or even a seemingly retrogressive state, when errors predominate." Original theory-->discrepancy identification-->Multiple theory-->Test for a unified theory. (p. 93)
2. Metaprocedural reorganization leads to a stepping-up in theory complexity when partially adequate, juxtaposed systems are well established. (Foundation.)  (p. 93)
3. "Meta procedural reorganization is not solely the response to external pressure or failure, rather it occurs spontaneously when the child has developed well functioning procedures that are incomplete, but adequate for the task at hand... A similar U-shaped developmental pattern has been observed in children's language acquisition).

The acquisition of a non-native language as the analogy of learning to live with psychosis.  Interlanguage...

Also, creative simplification (Karmiloff-Smith and Inhelder, 1974-1975) as opposed to overgeneralization-- surely sounds much better!  lol

Levels of self-regulation

Conscious or unconscious...

• Karmiloff-Smith (1979): "reference is being made to spontaneous metaprocedural behavior rather than to explicit awareness."
• "Error detection and correction as an implicit process

As opposed to the notion of metalinguistic awareness--the capability to consciously reflecting on one's own language and that of the others.

"Confused in the metacognitive literature, even lost in some versions of the concept, is the essential distinction between self-regulation during learning and mental experimentation with one's own thoughts." (p. 97)

Surely sounds far better than I am simply an incurably dumb axx.  lol

Other-regulation, a Vygotskian notion

Vygotsky's (1971) theory of internalization and social learning.

Status of metacognition as a concept

Brown's notion on theory development:
"Sientific theorizing, like any other, must pass through stages.  Consider as an example, the novice block balancers described earlier.  Initially, they are merely goal oriented; they concentrate on getting the new theory to work.  The next stage is to develop and refine subsystems so that they work fluently.  Only when these subsystems are functioning efficiently can the theorist step back and consider the entire problem space and systematize or reorganize it into a cohesive whole.  The recent history of theory development in the realm of metacognition can be viewed in this light."

""Currently a great deal of systematic work is being undertaken, hopefully, it will lead to fluently functioning subsystems that at present are merely juxtaposed, existing, and developing side-by-side; however, this is an essential stage of theory building.  Later, perhaps, when the main subsystems are better understood, metaprocedural reorganization may be possible, and a full understanding of the domain metacognition will be attained.  This chapter is primarily a contribution to the "juxtaposed procedures" stage of development."

The blanket term of metacognition and the fuzzy boundaries... an important issue to tackle... what deserves the meta tag?

Metacognition and the mechanism of change and development.

Greeno & Riley (1987). Processes and development of understanding

Got this one done with the wind of typhoon Soulik howling on the outside all night... (God bless!)

What this paper is to me... a means to explain the hopefully differential degree of ability for me to detect and work with my psychotic symptoms (e.g., delusion) in my much younger years such as right around the onset and now.  All about my level of understanding of my symptoms.

Greeno, James G., & Riley, Mary S. (1987). Processes and development of understanding. In F. E. Weinert & R. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp. 289-313). Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Process of understanding

Theoretical understanding

"Many cognitive procedures, at least to some extent, are based on general principles.  Many of the capabilities that are referred to as understanding relate to an individual's knowledge of such principles." For instance, do children's ability to count things correctly reflect their understanding in principles of number and quantity?" (p. 290-291)

• Explicit knowledge: Can you verbally state the principle and make explanations?  Whatever it is, I absolutely can't do it in Martian though might not be able to do it in any other languages either.
• Conformity: Does the performance conform to a principle?  There is this memorable exam that I took in junior high school.  I got a entire set of questions wrong.  For reasons unknown, for the entire section, I put down the correct answers (e.g., cuckoo bird) instead of the codes denoting the correct answer (e.g., a, b).
• Implicit understanding: One criteria is the ability to judge whether specific performance examples are consistent with the principle. The other is whether one can solve problems in a domain different from the one in which the procedure was initially acquired. 
• Analogical use of structure: The ability to transfer learning in one domain to solve problems in another.
• Transfer: Greeno (1983) hypothesized that "transfer is enabled by a schema that can be used to represent the structure of problems in the domain where a procedure is learned, as well as in the domain of transfer."

Intrinsic understanding

"Understanding a problem solution or problem-solving procedure would consist of constructing a representation of the solution or procedure, including meaningful relations among the various steps of the solution or the various cocomponents of the procedure.  Understanding of this kind may be analoguous to metacognitive knowledge, consisting of strategies for performance." (p. 295)

Knowledge for planning:

• "In the solution of a problem, understanding includes realizing the sets of problem steps that fit together in meaningful units.  It seems reasonable to classify the 'phrases' of a problem solution as sets of steps are related to a single major goal of the problem, or that are the details of a single global action. Newell and Simon (1972) used the term 'episode' to refer to such units" and distinguishes between essential and inessential problem features.
• Knowledge used in planning is metacognitive because it's about cognitive procedures.  "The metacognitive knowledge does not necessary include explicit representation of general principle, nor is it necessarily accompanied by any self-conscious processes that would constitute awareness of the cognitive organization that it determines."

So very synchronous and perhaps synchronicity is everywhere... as long as you look towards its direction.  I haven't taken a trip outside of Taiwan for over a year since everything is forbidden by my head as long as I don't get the book out (whether it is psychotic a nonsensical question to ask since I am psychotic).  Leave the notion of moving on with my life along since it seems to be a goal far too huge.  Let's take one baby step at a time and assume the problem to be solved today, 7/13/2013, is to plan a trip abroad (though I do walk around at large tripping on a daily basis).  The steps it takes is simple: a) make sure I have enough money to last me-->b) get the book done to the extend that my head permits me to plan to go anywhere-->c) (once authorized) make tentative plans--> d) (upon my head's authorization) buy plane tickets and pack up-->e) Go.

The biggest issue in this plan is part b (and of course a as well since Washington is very important) since part b was composed of multiple episodes each with their own subgoals and the steps it took to accomplish them given the constraints of my entire existence.  With what takes place in part b and what it might take to reach part c, how does the plans unfold?  As the sense of knowing, which could be called intuition, or delusions... an episode after another episode.  I can work on pushing the readings and writing through while living my life.

Does it mean that ying ying mei dai zi my life as an unemployed affords no nothing?  I am nothing.  The book might not sell too many copy.  Yet, I guess, I have the intent to contribute; I made my attempts to contribute and went through the whole 9 yards to get it done.  Whether anyone can get anything from it?  La forza. 

Something interesting about the notion of planning for me is that it requires the knowledge about how Is ams in order to move on with mes, myselves and Is... 

Though... looking at it from a different perspective... I surely won't be claiming that the theme song of my life is I've never been to me.. lol



(Speaking of tangential thinking... how on earth did the 3-paragraph section on Knowledge for Planning lead to all them words?! 8-O lol)

Integrated performance

Music example: "It seems reasonable to hypothesize that the understanding that results from practice includes appreciation of relationships within the piece that were not appreciated initially. (p. 296)
Algebra example: Practice result in the development of general schema, which might be "responsible for the ability to perform planfully, and therefore would constitute understanding." (p. 297)

Development of ability to understand

Theoretical framework and issues

Problem schemata and action schemata

Differences between younger and older children in problem-solving...

• Lack of action schemata? 
• Failure to activate the action schemata (three possible reasons ) 

1. not understanding the scenario (e.g., text comprehension issue) 
2. lack of connection between the problem and the action schemata 
3. lacking the problem schemata 

The authors were in favor of option 1 and 3... "regarding the problems analyzed, is that younger children have the general procedures needed to solve the problems, but the lack ability to coherently represent problem information." (p. 299)

What is the problem?  Identifying delusions for instance... I who didn't "know" delusions relating to supernatural power could not identify it. (Think I just mentioned similar comment yesterday... might be saturating what limited my existence can offer)

Evidence for action schemata

Young children's ability to answer how many birds won't get a worm but inability to answer the question of "how many more"?

Birds and worms

"An alternative interpretation of young children's difficulty is that they have not yet acquired procedures for representing the information in the "How many more?" problem, including the meaning of the question; that is, they do not yet have the schema for comparison needed to form representations that include comparative relationships between quantities. If it is assumed that the restatement of the question enables children to activate procedures for forming corresponding sets and counting the remainder without forming an intermediate schematized representation of the problem information, this interpretation is consistent with Hudson's finding." (p. 301-302)

Being able to perform one-to-one correspondence but not comparison.  An alternative way to look at how I could not catch my delusions about supernatural power.  

Analysis of developmental states

More about schema...

Conclusion

"the major developmental changes that enable older children to perform successfully is acquisition of procedures of understanding that construct representations of problem situations." (p. 311)
"Hudson's findings... show that a change in the wording of problems greatly facilitates young children's ability to solve them." (p. 311)
"older children have procedures for constructing general representations of quantitative relationships.  These schematized representations mediate between problem texts and problem-solving procedures.  They represent general structural features of problem situation."

Glaser & Pellegrino (1987). Aptitudes for learning and cognitive processes

For me, this chapter is about the development of symptom identification and intervention.  It's about pattern recognition... how symptoms are identified and how we can get better in identifying our symptoms... and intervene.

At the same time, from the perspective of the symptoms, don't we psychotics see linkages in the most irrelevant things? 


Glaser, Robert, & Pellegrino, James W. (1987). Aptitudes for learning and cognitive processes. In F. E. Weinert & R. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp. 267-288). Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

"It has been argued that rule induction process are similar to those demanded in concept formation, and that they are related to a major form of human problem solving that results in the acquisition of knowledge."

One major task involved in delusions is problem-solving... the emerging of ever-ending problems...  The learning to cope is simply the transfer of problem-solving demands in one dimension to another. 

The authors presented the following research on inductive reasoning:
Series completion problems: Training worked
Analogical reasoning problems: The authors addressed research three interrelated elements that appear to differentiate high- and low-skill individuals in analogical reasoning test task, including memory load, procedural knowledge of task constraints, and organization of an appropriate conceptual knowledge base.

• Figural analogie (memory load)

Good old cognitive load.

• Verbal analogies (procedural constraints)

"... because they involve increasingly detailed specification of the analogical rule and/or consideration of alternative conceptualizations of the rule, interactive solutions require more extensive processing than conceptually driven solutions... when low-ability individuals use the analogical solution procedure, they tend, more often than high-ability solvers, to evoke a sequence of processes corresponding to initial identification of the analogical rule; however, they do not subsequently modify that rule.  Although low-ability solvers are also capable of solving items interactively, they do so less often than high ability solvers.  On more difficult items, which are less likely to be solvable in the conceptually driven mode, low-ability solvers exhibit performance that violates task constraints." (p. 279)

"Skilled analogy solvers are characterized by more knowledge of task constraints, and by the ability to develop an understanding of the analogical rule in response to the item stem, the relationship involved, and the response options.

Sounds like a good way to explain the (hopefully) differences between how I handle my psychosis 10 years ago and today.

• Numerical analogies (Knowledge base influences)

"This knowledge correlates with and predicts analogy performance.  High-ability subjects use their knowledge of abstract number relationships to constrain the domain of permissible operations; this knowledge based determines the appropriate use of strategies. " (p. 285)

Though it might be too far a transfer... I think (or hope ) I am doing better in making use of the knowledge about my symptoms than, say, 10 years ago.  More practices and more unfortunately acquired knowledge about the behavior of my symptoms, I guess.

Implications

Training on:

• Training on mental processing skills can provide better methods for searching memory and elaborating connections, which would facilitate storage and retrieval.
• Training on knowledge strategy can help improve the ways a knowledge base is recognized and manipulated.  When highly skilled individuals learn something new or undertake a new problem of induction, they engage a highly organized structure of appropriate facts and relationships, and associated procedures and goal constraints.  Skilled individuals are skilled because of their knowledge of both the content involved in a problem and the procedural constraints of a particular problem form, such as inductive or analogical reasoning.

Chi, Michelene T.H. (1987). Presenting knowledge and metaknowledge: implications for interpreting metamemory research

An interesting article making arguments on why some meta stuffs aren't really meta.  At the same time, isn't it true that the outcome of meta-processes can be encoded for later recall... the conversion of meta to non-meta?  Donno.  Just a thought.

Chi, Michelene T.H. (1987). Presenting knowledge and metaknowledge: implications for interpreting metamemory research. In F. E. Weinert & R. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp. 239-266). Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

A framework of representing knowledge

"The author borrows heavily from the work of Anderson (1976), Greeno (1978), and Norman and Rumelhart (1975); however, any deviations and modifications of their work are the results of intuition and preconceived biases, suitable for explaining developmental findings." (p. 245)

Domain knowledge

Domain knowledge can take two forms: declarative and procedural.

Declarative knowledge is factual in nature...  "Declarative knowledge can be represented in terms of a semantic propositional network, where a concept (such as a dog) may be represented as a node, and links specify the relationships among the nodes... The degree of complexity of the semantic network should correspond to the amount, elaborateness, and organization of a child's declarative knowledge." (P. 245-246)

"Procedural knowledge is knowledge about how to do things.... Furthermore, procedural knowledge can be represented as a set of production rules, which are condition-action pairs."  (p. 246-247)

Strategy

The notion of strategies seem to have a special status in developmental research because "they have he property of being general and global, rather than domain-specific."  P2 in the above figure is an example of a strategy--a general procedure applicable to different domains.

The four properties of a strategy: (p. 247)

1. General and domain-independent
2. Like all procedures, it has a goal
3. Like all procedures, it can have several components
4. The number of strategies in memory is small (there should be fewer number of P2 than P3-P9).

The implications of the above definition: (p. 248)

• Strategies might have the properties of procedural knowledge and they are represented in the same way as production rules.
• The separation between strategies and procedural knowledge is artificial but serve a purpose.
• Studies have been conducted on the training of strategies for the purpose of generalization.  

The observed failure to transfer might be due to the fact that what was taught was domain-specific procedures (e.g., P3, P4) rather than domain-independent strategies (e.g., P2).  Younger children need to be told explicitly to use the strategies learned and it could be due to a problem in the encoding of goals because when the goal is missing, the procedure might not fail to be activated.  The reason why older children learn to learn and adopt the strategies faster than younger children could be due to the fact that they already have different versions of the a production (e.g., P3, P4, P5) in memory and it makes it easier to acquire the general form, the strategy production (P2).

A good way of looking at my coping with psychosis during the onset, right after the onset, and now.  Can't say getting all that good though I guess and I hope I am getting better learning to cope.  Sort of like, you don't know it's delusion, you don't know that you have to intervene.  Whether the intervention is procedural knowledge or a strategy is not really an issue for me.  Though, shall strategies be considered as a more general form and content-independent of production rules, it surely would be harder to extract a strategy rule if you do not have enough procedural knowledge.

Metaknowledge

What is metaknowledge?

• The straightfoward way-->metaknowledge is cognitive knowledge and metamemory would be memory knowledge.
• The more complex way-->second-order knowledge.

Meta-delcarative knowledge (p. 249-250)

1. Meta as a reference to cognitive knowledge?  "Meta-declarative knowledge would be factual knowledge about cognition like factual knowledge about any other domain.
2. Meta refers to second-order knowledge, or a function? In this case, "meta-declarative knowledge would be the same thing as a procedure or a strategy... Hence, theoretically, meta-declarative knowledge would take the same form as either procedural knowledge or strategies." For instance, how much do I know about animals?  To answer the question, you have to search or activate relevant nodes in the semantic network and make assessment thereafter.  "The complexity of the processes needed to answer meta-declarative type of questions depends on whether or not the question addresses a prestored declarative knowledge, or if a procedure is needed to assess existing declarative knowledge about cognition."

Let's replace it with this question... "Is this delusional?"  And... remember... delusions morph and don't always appear in the same fashion... though contains certain "delusional" attributes, which should make the notion of delusion detection something mighty interesting...

Meta-strategies: (P. 250-251)

"Again, there are two ways to represent meta-strategic knowledge.  One way is direct prestored declarative knowledge"... For instance, "Do you remember better than your friends?" In this case, the term meta is used only to refer to knowledge about strategies or activities of remembering."

"Alternatively, one can also view meta-strategic knowledge as second-order operations.  In this case, meta-strategy would be a rule that evaluates another rule (See P1).  If it's the first time you encounter the question, "Do you remember better than your friends?"  There is no restored answer... and one has to engage in assessments to perform evaluations at two levels: the level of the output of each individual memory strategy and the level of the sum of all the available strategies for remembering.

"Is this delusional?" Chances are... though delusions are fairly similar in certain principles, it's highly unlikely for them to be the same. Thus, the lower degree of likelihood for you to find a stored answer.  Yet, the head must have some interesting way of conducting pattern matching when performing delusion detection... possibly... partial identification of attributes of delusions for the sake of efficiency.

"However, because meta-strategies can themselves be represented as production rules, they are not different in form of quality from other production rules, such as strategies and procedural knowledge.  Hence, there is agreement with Flavell's (1979) assumption that 'metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences differ from other kinds only in their content and function, not in their form or quality'." (p. 251)

Meta-procedural knowledge: (p. 251)

Similar to meta-strategies, meta-procedural knowledge are rules that evaluate other domain-specific rules.  

Summary and discussion

Interesting notion...

"Beyond these rules, there should be a set of executive rules, controlling the entire system's on going activities (whether the system is a child, a program, or an adult).  Executive rules are analogous to an interpreter than determines the sequence of processes to be executed.  A variety of processes, such as monitoring one's own state of processing and allocating ongoing attention, has now been given a new status of meta-processes... Why these executive processes have been given a new name, other than the possibility that they control memory processes, is unclear." (P. 254) 

Metamemory research

This is a somewhat random selection [the research], simply because it is nearly impossible to be exhaustive for a paper of this length.  The selected examples serve to illustrate the complexity and fuzziness of some of the metamemory research.

Metaknowledge of person variable

Whether or not an age effect can be observed (p. 254)

1. total amount of related experience
2. whether greater amount of experience can produce a more accurate and robust assessment
3. the consistency of early encounters

"For example, if a minimal amount of experience is sufficient to produce a robust assessment, then a stable knowledge of person variable could probably be reached early in life; consequently no age effect will be observed." (p. 254)

Why the onset is inevitable?  Why the occurrences of reinstitutionalization and the institutionalizable grade of mental state?

Sensitivity

"a young child has in memory only production rules that approximate the final mature rules (such as P6), but not the mature rules themselves (such as P2).  Therefore, the overt request to memorize is not a sufficient cue to trigger the strategic rule P2 and other similar rules."

"Sensitivity may reflect only a deficit in existing cognitive rules.

Would say I agree with it.  Why did I get institutionalized the second time?  The delusions in the onset was about fame and wealth etc.  The delusions in the second major episode... the highlight... the Appocalypse.  The P2 actually was not mature enough since it ain't got no idea about delusions associated with Appocalypse etc.  You can't ientify what you don't know and thus failure to intervne (regardless the effectiveness of interventions.)

Monitoring and checking

Based on the study of expert and novice physicist, the author came up with the argument that "younger children's inability to accurately monitor their current state of knowledge (such as preparedness for recall), as well as their inadequate allocation of attention, is attributed to an inadequacy in part of their domain knowledge related to the stimulus items, rather than strictly underdeveloped monitoring process." (p. 260)

Check is a notion related to monitoring.  In the physicist study, by mistake, "the numerical value for one of the known variables in the problems was too large, so that the actual numerical solution was unusually small.  Guess what the outcome might be... of course... results indicated a difference between expert and novice.

"One possible interpretation for such results is that over years of experiences, the experts have acquired schemata of problem types, and one of the slots of a schema is potential values of the solution.  Hence, when a value does not correspond to the range dictated in the schema, it signals to him that he should doublecheck... checking is totally an outcome of the presence of the relevant domain knowledge in memory, and not a meta-strategy that some individuals have and others do not." (p. 261)

As I grow older in my psychotic age, guess I also started to acquire schemata of problem types with one of the associated schema as the potential solution.... therefore... defects and workarounds.

Summary and discussion

Sensitivity and executive processes such as monitoring and checking need not be called meta.  With the personal variable type of study, it's difficult to tease apart what is meta and what is not.

General discussion

"It was conjectured that the reason that children may not, for example, check their solution as readily as adults, reflects not so much deficits in their control or monitoring processes, but rather, the lack of a relevant schema in the declarative knowledge base to tell them that the answer was inappropriate." (p. 263)

The little relation between memory and metamemory performance? A definition problem. (p. 263-264)

• A variety of meta-type tasks are really not meta, therefore, one would not expect performance on thoses tasks to correlate with memory performance
• metaknowledge is not unlike knowledge of any other domain, and it is conceivable that knowledge of cognition and knowledge of noncognitive domains develop simultaneously and independently, so that one need not bear one the other
• the only kind of processes that must have some relation to cognition are those that evaluate other strategies or rules.