Definition
Plain language
Thinking about your own thinking — noticing what you know and how you're solving a problem.
As stated in the literature
Flavell's 1979 cognitive-psychology construct comprising metacognitive knowledge (awareness of relevant facts and one's own knowledge state) and metacognitive regulation (planning, monitoring, evaluating); operationalized as a reward signal in the MaR framework.
Also called: metacognitive
Why it matters: Building it into AI training is a bet that models which monitor their own reasoning will be more reliable than ones that just produce confident output.
For example, a student notices mid-problem that her current approach isn't working, decides why, and switches strategies — the noticing and the deciding are metacognition.
Heard on the show
“Flavell coined the term metacognition.”Episode 079 — An Old Idea From Cognitive Psychology Reshapes How We Reward Reasoning Models