0.4 The definitions of meta-representation and meta-cognition

Meta-cognition is 'knowing about knowing'. When a person knows what strategies their mind is using, or knows what they are thinking or how they are thinking - then they are thinking about their own thinking - and that is 'meta-cognition'.

Nelson and Narens (1990) proposed a conceptual framework that has been adopted by most researchers. According to them, cognitive processes may be divided into those that occur at the object level and those that occur at the meta-level: The object level includes the basic operations traditionally subsumed under the rubric of information processing – encoding, rehearsing, retrieving, and so on. The meta-level is assumed to oversee object-level operations (monitoring) and return signals to regulate them actively in a top-down fashion (control). The object-level, in contrast, has no control over the meta-level and no access to it.

So the object level does the automatic processes that are directed or monitored by the conscious mind. For example - text-processing is automatic and therefore it is at the object or unconscious level - however (obviously) the text is also understood consciously. This is because there is a difference between what someone understands unconsciously and what someone is understanding consciously.

Everything the mind does without conscious awareness is by definition unconscious. Therefore, most of the mind and its functions are unconscious. For instance you may remember many things you don't know about - or even understand many things you don't know consciously (but at times that knowledge might rise to consciousness).

Meta-representations

If meta-cognition is thinking about thinking, then meta-representation is thinking about your representations.

Strictly speaking a meta-representation is a representation about another representation. In this article I use examples of representations and meta-representations, but that is subjective. Someone could label any detail as being a meta-representation of another detail it represents - it just depends what you think is representing what.

For instance if you say 'my dog is green' then you could say that is either a representation of your dog or a meta-representation since you are thinking about the representation of your dog being green.

Representations are basically something in the world that is represented in your mind in some way - Here Sam Scott explains Von Eckardt's definition of representations:

• I will use the term “representation” to mean mental representation as defined in Von Eckardt's (1999)MITECS entry. Her definition of mental representation is (I hope) sufficiently broad and uncontroversial to beacceptable to most of the various competing currents in cognitive science. According to Von Eckardt, a(mental) representation has four important aspects: “(1) it is realized by a representation bearer; (2) it hascontent or represents one or more objects; (3) its representation relations are somehow ‘grounded’; (4) itcan be interpreted by (will serve as a representation for) some interpreter.” (p. 527) Points (1) and (4) in theabove establish that a (mental) representation requires a subject that both bears and can interpret therepresentation.