Dr. Janet Metcalfe is the principal investigator in the Metacognition & Memory Lab. Her research is focused on metacognitive abilities, which is how people know what they know. It is evolutionarily advantageous for us, and for self-control. Here we discuss her background and research, session 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you consider your greatest emotional struggle? How did you overcome it?
Dr. Janet Metcalfe: Well, it is pretty hard having a baby, getting a thesis done, and having my whole salary going into my baby. It was a conflict between career and family life. It is hard being an academic with a family life fighting for tenure.
I think women more than men have more assumed responsibility for children than men. There is a biological clock. This usually becomes an issue when you are coming up for having a child and going to compete for jobs and tenure.
That is when your children need you the most too. It is very, very hard. I think we should do a lot more. People helped me! When I was a post doc at UCLA, Elizabeth Bjork was on the board of directors of the Wesley Presbyterian Nursery School, which is a couple of blocks from the lab. It was a great nursery school.
She negotiated on my behalf so I could get free childcare there. I got to see my kid all the time. I got to know the other kids. And I got free tuition. She totally ran interference for me. It happened again and again in my career. People helped me a lot. We need to help people a lot. We need to help women a lot. It makes their life possible.
Jacobsen: Your current research focuses on peoples’ metacognitive abilities. In particular, the use of metacognition for self-control. How do you define meta-cognitive abilities?
What have you found with your research on metacognitive abilities since around 2010 onward?
Metcalfe: I have been focusing on the agency. On people’s sense of doing what they’re doing. I have been really focusing on metacognition and agency. I think this is an absolutely fascinating problem. How do I know that I am me, right? So we created a little computer game lovingly called space pilot.
There are Xs and Os all over the screen. You move the cursor to catch the Xs. We can intervene in things such as noise into the system and time delay into the system. We can ask people what the performances were like – what is called straight metacognition, “How in control did you feel?”
We are finding that there are very dramatic differences and similarities in this judgment of control, knowing when you are in control. For example, people who have schizophrenia do not have control. They can judge the performance. So there’s straight metacognition is okay.
There is judgment is okay. But they do not know if we have intervened. There are a whole lot of consequences, I think, in their real life, if they cannot judge real life – if they cannot judge what is coming from the external real world. It is very central for their ability to get around in the real world.
People with Asperger’s have some problems too. For example, they have problems with self-boundaries. We have found some interesting glitches. They will take credit for magic. Other undergraduates will not take credit for magic. If it is good and it is kids, it is because of them. There are these very interesting differences.
We have put participants in brain scanners. There are several components that we are able to isolate. It looks like there are a variety of cues that people use to make this very central judgment that your grandmother sings is just obvious, I know I have done it. It is direct knowledge.”
Well, it is not direct knowledge. It is inferential knowledge, but the inferential knowledge that we mostly get right and it is a good thing that we do. We are starting to know that right temporal-parietal junction in the brain has something to do with detecting when things are not going the way they should when you feel that things are not in your control.
We know the frontal-polar area, behind your forehead more or less, has to do with making the judgment itself. It has to do with all kinds of self-relevant judgments. It seems to have to do with all kinds of attributions of the kind of person that you are, but you have to know at some level that this is you doing it.
Also, we know striatum, in the old brain, is the reward system of the brain is connected so that you feel the reward for your feeling in control – for you being an agent. So we are starting to get an idea of the neural components and psychological cues that people use.
So we are starting to understand it, which is kind of fascinating. That is the stuff since 2010.
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Read (Part 1) by clicking here.
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Article originally published in on www.in-sightjournal.com and republished with permission from the author.
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