Bennett L. Schwartz

The goal of this volume will be to present the best theoretical and empirical work on the adaptive nature of memory. It features the most current work of a number of cognitive psychologists, developmental psychologists, comparative psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists who have focused on this issue. This is important because much of this work is necessarily interdisciplinary and is therefore spread out across a range of journals and conferences.

"When the memory retrieval process breaks down, people wonder exactly why and how such a thing occurs. In many cases, failed retrieval is accompanied by a "tip-of-the-tongue state," a feeling that an unretrieved item is stored in memory. Tip-of-the-tongue states stand at the crossroads of several research traditions within cognitive science. Some research focuses on the nature of the retrieval failure. Other research tries to determine what tip-of-the-tongue states can tell us about the organization of lexical memory - that is, what aspects of a word we can recall when we are otherwise unable to do so. Still other research focuses on the nature of the experience of a tip-of-the-tongue state. Each of these perspectives is represented in this book, which presents the best theoretical and empirical work on these subjects. Much of the work is cross-disciplinary, but what unifies the topics in this book is that they concern strong phenomenological states of knowing that are not accompanied by recall or recognition of the desired information"--

This is an up-to-date overview of relation between theories in metacognition and their real-world application. The book has contributions from many of the leading researchers in metacognition from around the world.