Metacognition is a term used in psychology to refer to the ability of people to self-regulate their learning process. Through metacognition, human beings can know and control their own basic mental states that participate in their cognition.
This aptitude, which is located on a higher plane than thought, is distinguished by a high level of consciousness and voluntary mastery, since it makes it possible to manage other much simpler cognitive processes. The knowledge about cognition itself, assumes that a person is able to be aware of the way they carried out their way to learn and understand why the consequences of an activity, have been positive or negative.
The concept of metacognition is relatively new. It arose as a result of various studies in psychology during the 70s; Based on the research done by John Flavell, who stated that metacognition is created in the individual, because he is a thinking living being and that he is susceptible to making mistakes every time he thinks, therefore he needs a method that allows him to control these mistakes. In the same way, metacognition is essential for people since it allows them to plan and make decisions in an argued way, about topics of interest to them.
There are various metacognitive modalities that help organize and plan thinking and different cognitive processes, some of them are:
Meta-memory: it deals with the knowledge of one's own memory. Know the skills in certain areas and the aptitude of the person to associate previous knowledge with new knowledge.
Meta-attention: refers to the regulation of one's attention. It is the ability to focus attention, at the right moment when it is required to do so and external and internal factors, which are known, that could cause difficulty when maintaining attention on something.
Meta-compression: it means understanding the capacity that everyone has for understanding. There are cases where a subject reads a text over the top, he supposes that he understood perfectly what the text wanted to say; However, when you ask him a question about the content, he would realize that he did not understand the writing, in all its nuances.
