ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the impact of metacognitive reflection on cognitive behavior. Metacognitive reflection is not identified with voluntary control and strategy choice but is related to them. Cognitive psychology has for a long time focused on the processes carried out in doing cognitive tasks, but only more recently has interest been directed toward participant's intentional and aware control and strategic choice. Converging evidence on the role of metacognitive knowledge in cognitive activity comes from research showing that metacognitive knowledge is not simply an experiential by-product of cognitive activity. A few different lines of research have tried to describe characteristics of metacognitive knowledge; these studies include Flavell's explorations of children's ideas about different aspects of cognitive functioning; the researchers involved in the study of folk psychology, or people's naive comprehension of their own mental states. This research presents participants with a metacognitive questionnaire on mental imagery that focused on how people behave in a classical and largely discussed mental imagery experiment.
