ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with a topic of growing importance in psychology: subjective feelings, sensations, and conscious control of memory processes. The topic is of relevance to every other chapter in this book: When you see someone walking down the street and you recognise their face (Chapter 4), but you do not know where from, how does that feel? When you have a tip-of-the-tongue experience and you cannot think of a word that you want to useÐhow frustrating is that? When, sat in an exam, you have rich evocative recollections connected to your knowledgeÐlike remembering exactly where and when you were taught about ¯ashbulb memoryÐ how helpful is that conscious awareness to the task in hand? What do these feelings tell us about our memory processes andÐin the real worldÐhow do these feelings in¯uence our subsequent behaviours as we search for the answers? This topic is often described as metacognition: your thoughts about your thoughts. The main aim of this chapter is to present the ways in which the study of memory from the subjective viewpoint considering consciousness and states of awareness illuminates our understanding of real-world memory behaviours; in doing so it gives an overview of the topic of metacognition.
