metamemory

Metamemory or Socratic awareness, a type of metacognition, is both the introspective knowledge of one's own memory capabilities (and strategies that can aid memory) and the processes involved in memory self-monitoring. This self-awareness of memory has important implications for how people learn and use memories. When studying, for example, students make judgments of whether they have successfully learned the assigned material and use these decisions, known as "judgments of learning", to allocate study time.

== History == Descartes, among other philosophers, marveled at the phenomenon of what we now know as metacognition. "It was not so much thinking that was indisputable to Descartes, but rather thinking about thinking. What he could not imagine was that the person engaged in such self-reflective processing did not exist." In the late 19th century, Bowne and James contemplated, but did not scientifically examine, the relationship between memory judgments and memory performance.