ABSTRACT
Privileged access allows an individual to know about the idiosyncratic or personal contents of his or her own mind (Nelson, Leonesio, Landwehr, &Narens, 1986). The belief that individuals have privileged access to the contents of their minds underlies the study of metacognition. If individuals cannot access the contents of their minds either directly or indirectly, they cannot judge the level of their knowledge, their degree of learning, or the accuracy of their test performance. The research reported in the present chapter investigates privileged access with two types of materials: newly learned text material and general knowledge. In addition, privileged access was investigated both by using normative data as compared to individual data (Underwood, 1966; Nelson et al., 1986) and by comparing predictions about one's own performance with predictions about the performance of others (Lovelace, 1984; Underwood, 1966; Vesonder &Voss, 1985).
