You’ve decided to go to a country you’ve never been to for your next vacation and want to learn some basics of the language to prepare for your trip. You order a book of introductory phrases and grammar basics. When it arrives, you eagerly crack it open, ready to dig in.

You start reading the first page. And then… your mind wanders. You begin thinking about all the places you want to visit during your travels. You feel a slight gnaw of hunger. Would a snack help you concentrate? Maybe you’ll get one in a few minutes. You turn your focus back to the page. What was that vocabulary word? Oh right, that one’s similar to an equivalent word in a language you already know. No problem, you can skim this section. Uh oh, you’ve skimmed too far and now everything is unfamiliar. You skip back a few paragraphs and start reading the phrases more carefully.

This example highlights some of the cognitive activities you could be engaged in while trying to perform a task. You could be maintaining focus on the task itself. You could be thinking about things unrelated to the task, like daydreaming about exploring a new city or thinking about getting a snack. Or, you could be thinking about how you’re performing. This includes thinking that you were doing well remembering certain vocabulary words or thinking that you were struggling with a section and deciding to go back to put more effort in.

Thinking about your own cognitive processes is called metacognition. And under that umbrella term, thinking about your own task performance is called metacognitive monitoring. While a lot of research has examined how good we are at judging our cognitive performance, much less has focused on how frequently we actually do it. In a recent article in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, researchers Megan Jordano and Dayna Touron reviewed factors that might influence how frequently we spontaneously engage in metacognitive monitoring.

So, what are some of these factors?

Difficulty

Learners tend to spend more time studying difficult items than easy items. It may be that learners monitor their performance more frequently when material is difficult, so as to be able to put more time and effort in when it is needed. Likewise, when people complete more difficult tasks, they also tend to have more thoughts about those tasks.

When it comes to foreign language learning, you may monitor your performance more frequently when you get to difficult sections, since you’ll likely have to stop and review them to get things right. Reading a section of items that are similar to words you already know in another language might mean you don’t have to monitor your performance as frequently.

Concreteness

People are more likely to think that they’ll remember items that are concrete, rather than more abstract. This might also lead people to monitor their performance more frequently when learning abstract items.

In the context of learning a new language, you might monitor how you’re doing more frequently when learning the vocabulary for government functions and offices in a new language (which tend to be abstract) than when learning a list of animal names (which tend to be concrete).

Mood

People who are in a negative mood seem to spend more time thinking about things related to the task they’re engaged in.

So, if you’re studying new foreign language phrases, you might monitor your performance more often if you are in a bad mood. Although it might be hard to keep that bad mood while learning a language you are going to use on vacation!

Motivation

When people are more motivated to do a task, they’re less likely to think about things unrelated to that task while doing it. So, it may be that people who are highly motivated also think more about their task performance, rather than daydreaming about something else.

If your trip is coming up soon and you’re very motivated to nail down your new vocabulary before you take off, you may monitor how well you’re performing frequently as you review essential vocabulary. Monitoring will let you catch any last-minute mistakes so that you can devote energy to fixing them now.

Age

People who are older tend to have more thoughts that are related to the task they’re completing than younger adults. It may be that these thoughts are the result of older adults more frequently monitoring their performance.

So, if you are older and studying difficult vocabulary in a new language, you may monitor your performance more frequently than someone who is younger.

Age also interacts with some other factors in interesting ways.

One is personality.

Younger adults who are more extraverted and open to experience tend to be too confident in their memory performance. If you are a younger adult who is high on these traits, you may monitor your vocabulary learning performance less frequently than you should, since you perceive your vocabulary learning prowess to better than it is.

For older adults, those who are more agreeable and conscientious tend to be more accurate in their judgments of performance. If you are an older adult high on these traits, you may frequently monitor your performance on challenging tasks like vocabulary learning in a new language.

Monitoring cognitive performance, and varying how frequently we monitor it, allows us to more efficiently read, learn, and memorize new phrases. And that’s good for picking up essentials like “which way is the train station?” faster.

Psychonomics article featured in this post

Jordano, M. L., & Touron, D. R. (2018). How often are thoughts metacognitive? Findings from research on self-regulated learning, think-aloud protocols, and mind-wandering. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 1269-1286. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-018-1490-1.