The seeds for this volume were planted prior to the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (SARMAC) conference in Boulder, Colorado. The editors of this volume planned to organize a symposium for the conference on applications of metacognition research. Within days of their initial emails to potential participants, the symposium had become symposia, and in the end, there were three separate sessions on metacognition at that conference. The enthusiasm of metacognition researchers, generally a theoretically oriented lot, for applications was palpable. Most of these chapters stem from discussions held at that conference.

During the conference barbecue, the editors began mapping out a volume to be called Applied metacognition, whilst simultaneously contemplating the Rocky Mountains in the distance, trying to eat a barbecue with a plastic knife while sitting on the grass, and helping themselves to the contents of a complimentary bar. The conversation and wine flowed freely, and eventually the current volume took shape. Our aim was a book that would cover as many potential applications of metacognitive research as possible and would be inclusive of different approaches within the field. To meet this aim, we decided to approach some of the foremost researchers in the area. Fortunately, many of them were at the same barbecue, and so the task was not as onerous as it might have been.

There are many people to thank who helped us prepare the book. We gratefully acknowledge all of the authors who contributed to this book.

As is often the case with research projects, what sparked our interest in the subject of this chapter – unconscious plagiarism – was a personal experience described to us by colleagues, which appears to be quite common. The experience is this: our colleagues' students believe that their supervisors have stolen their research ideas, while our colleagues believe that the idea was originally theirs, and can provide strong supporting evidence for their beliefs. The prime example we were made aware of involved a postgraduate student who accused his supervisor of having published a paper which appropriated the entire research plan for his Ph.D. The supervisor was justly outraged and amazed at this accusation. She attributed this to unconscious plagiarism of an idea that she first suggested to the student during an initial meeting at which she offered a number of suggestions to assist the student in implementing a research idea. The student was equally convinced that the paradigm he eventually adopted arose from his own intensive reading of the literature and problem-solving skills. The student conceded that at an initial meeting a number of ideas were bandied back and forth; however, he also claimed to remember the process by which he discovered how to apply a particular psychological paradigm to answer a research question in a novel way. This occurred at a date well after the initial discussion with the supervisor, and the novelty of the approach particularly impressed itself on the student's mind.

Imagine the following scenario. A thief throws a brick through a shop window, grabs the merchandise on display, and runs off before the shopkeeper sees anything. The only two witnesses to the crime were standing in the street at the time, and they come forward to help the police. One witness – let's call him Jake – says that he is very confident that the thief was dark-haired, whilst another witness – Sam – is fairly confident that the thief had blonde hair. Clearly there is a discrepancy in the descriptions, and in the confidence that the witnesses espouse in their descriptions. Should the police (and later the courts) have greater faith in the witness with the most confidence? Whilst the majority of members of the public might say “yes,” the psychological literature does not warrant such a clear-cut and positive response.

Expert psychologists were asked a generalized version of this question, over ten years ago, in a survey of expert opinion by Kassin, Ellsworth, and Smith (1989). Kassin et al. asked sixty-three experts in the area whether they felt that various forensic psychology findings were reliable enough for psychologists to present in courtroom testimony. One such issue was the weak relationship between confidence and accuracy. An overwhelming majority of experts in the area (87 percent) agreed that the effect (i.e., the lack of relationship between confidence and accuracy) was reliable enough to present as testimony, and a similar figure (83 percent) reported that they would be prepared to testify themselves (37 percent already having done so).

Metacognition is traditionally defined as the experiences and knowledge we have about our own cognitive processes (e.g. Flavell, 1979). Although ripe for philosophers and cognitive psychologists (e.g. Nelson, 1996), this topic may not appear at a first glance to be one immediately applicable to everyday human life. However, we hope to show in this book that metacognition has broad applications across a number of different settings. Furthermore, we contend that, unlike some laboratory research, metacognitive data from the lab have parallels to real-world phenomena and therefore can be applied. The nature of metacognition is such that, in order to study it effectively in the lab, one must devise situations that mimic real life. The current volume will also attest to the ease with which metacognition research moves back and forth from theoretical questions to applied concerns, a situation we consider most desirable in any scientific endeavor.

Let us begin with examples from everyday life in which metacognition is important. Imagine a student studying for an exam. It is well past midnight, she has been studying for hours, and is exhausted. The decision that this student must make is whether she has studied the material for the exam sufficiently and can go to sleep, or whether she must brew another pot of coffee and keep studying. The student must decide whether the material is generally well-learned, and if not, what information necessitates further study.