Foundations of Metacognition

Michael J. Beran is a Senior Research Scientist at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Oglethorpe University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Georgia State University. His research is conducted with humans and nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, capuchin monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and elephants. His research interests include metacognition, numerical cognition, planning and prospective memory, self-control, decision making, and language acquisition. He is a Fellow of Division 6 and Division 3 of the American Psychological Association. He was the inaugural Duane M. Rumbaugh Fellow at Georgia State University. His research has been featured on numerous television and radio programs and in magazines, including Animal Planet, BBC, New Scientist, the Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American Mind.Johannes L. Brandl is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Salzburg. He received his PhD from the University of Graz, and got tenured at the University of Salzburg. His main areas of research are in philosophy of mind (theories of intentionality and self-awareness), epistemology (externalism and self-knowledge), and in the history of Austrian Phenomenology (the Brentano School). He was Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, the University of California, Irvine, and at the Centre for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.Josef Perner received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto. He was Professor in Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex and is now Professor of Psychology and member of the Centre for Neurocognitive Research at the University of Salzburg. He is author of "Understanding the Representational Mind" (MIT Press, 1991) and over 150 articles on cognitive development (theory of mind, executive control, episodic memory, logical reasoning), consciousness (perception versus action), simulation in decision making, and theoretical issues of mental representation, consciousness, and metacognition. He served as President of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Association for Psychological Sciences, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel.Joëlle Proust studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Provence. A researcher at CNRS from 1976, she first conducted research on the history and the philosophy of logic. Her first book, derived from her habilitation thesis, Questions of form (Gallimard, 1986, Minnesota Press, 1989), received the bronze medal of CNRS.?? From then on, she turned to the analytic philosophy of mind: she published articles and books on intentionality and animal cognition (Comment l'Esprit vient aux Bêtes, Paris, 1997, Les animaux pensent-ils? 2003, 2010). She also explored the kind of awareness associated with agency and personal identity and in its perturbations in schizophrenia and autism. (La Nature de la Volonté, 2005). She further edited or co-edited seven books.

Beran and colleagues have provided an important and useful collection which discusses in rich depth some of the most important issues in the study of metacognition The book will be a valuable resource to researchers and serve as a good way into the study of metacognition for new scholars. It will also be invaluable for those wishing to seek to broaden their horizons regarding the range of positions taken in debates around metacognition. I recommend this book both as research and as reference material.

• METACOGNITION IN NON-HUMAN ANIMALS; METACOGITION IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT; FUNCTIONS OF METACOGNITION