Metacognitive Diversity ― An Interdisciplinary Approach

Metacognition refers to our awareness of our own mental processes, such as perceiving, remembering, learning, and problem solving. It is a fascinating area of research for psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers.

This book explores the variability of metacognitive skills across cultures, since a person's decision to allocate effort, motivation to learn, sense of being right or wrong in perceptions, memories, and other cognitive tasks depends on specific transmitted goals, norms, and values. Across nineteen chapters, a group of leading authors analyze the variable and universal features associated with these dimensions, drawing on cutting-edge evidence.

Additionally, new domains of metacognitive variability are considered in this volume, including those generated by metacognition-oriented embodied practices (present in rituals and religious worship), and culture-specific lay theories about subjective uncertainty and knowledge regarding natural or supernatural entities. It also documents universal metacognitive features, such as children's earlier sensitivity to their own ignorance than to that of others, people's intuitive understanding of what counts as knowledge, and speakers' sensitivity to informational sources (independently of the way the information is linguistically expressed).

The book is important reading for students and scholars in cognitive and cultural psychology, anthopology, developmental and social psychology, linguistics, and philosophy.

Joelle Proust is a French philosopher working at Institut Jean-Nicod, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris and Emeritus Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. She has conducted research at the CNRS since 1976 about the history and the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of human and animal cognition, agency, personal identity and metacognition. Thanks to an advanced grant by the European Research Council (2011-2016), Joelle has conducted collaborative research with developmental psychologists, neuroscientists and cognitive anthropologists on the empirical and conceptual aspects of metacognitive diversity, in order to explore whether children and adults from Western Europe, Japan and non-industrialized Mesoamerican cultures differ in the ways they control and evaluate their own cognitive activity.

Martin Fortier is a doctoral student at Institut Jean-Nicod, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Ecole Normale Superieure, PSL Research University, Paris. Situated at the intersection of cognitive science, anthropology, and philosophy of mind, his research explores the interplay between cultural and neurobiological processes in hallucinogenic experiences-especially in the context of Amazonian shamanism-and animistic thinking, reasoning and categorization in Lowland South America. His fieldwork is located among Shipibo communities of the Ucayali River, Peru.