ABSTRACT
How readily information "comes to mind" is one index humans use to assess the accuracy of that information and, more generally, the adequacy of their own state of knowledge in a given domain. Such retrieval fluency provides, in fact, a useful heuristic: In general, information that is better learned, more recent, and more strongly associated to the cues guiding recall (or any combination of the three) will tend to be more readily retrievable. Fluent retrieval can, however, reflect factors unrelated to accuracy or degree of prior learning. In that sense, making appropriate use of retrieval fluency (or the lack thereof) as a metacognitive index becomes a problem of inference.
