CONCEPT
Metacognition — Thinking About Thinking
The formal operational capacity to reflect on one's own cognitive processes — the last and most demanding of the new cognitive tools, and the one required to interrogate the premises of an identity framework.
Metacognition is the cognitive capacity to examine one's own thinking — to notice confusion and ask why, to evaluate one's own reasoning and find it wanting, to step outside one's own perspective and consider it from another. John Flavell coined the term in the 1970s, but the capacity it names is the late formal operational achievement Piaget identified as the most demanding application of abstract thought. Metacognition is what makes the twelve-year-old's question possible — she can now turn her mind on itself. It is also what she lacks when the question arrives: the mature metacognitive ability to interrogate the premises of her own capability-based framework rather than merely reason within it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The capacity emerges with early formal operations but matures slowly across adolescence and into adulthood. A twelve-year-old can perform metacognitive operations in some domains — evaluating her own math solution for errors, considering whether an argument