Metacognition and Uncertainty Communication in Humans and Large Language Models
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metacognition—the capacity to monitor and evaluate one’s own knowledge and performance—is foundational to human decision-making, learning, and communication. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in both high-stakes and widespread low-stakes contexts, it is important to assess whether, how, and to what extent they exhibit metacognitive abilities. Here, we provide an overview of the current knowledge of LLMs’ metacognitive capacities, how they might be studied, and how they relate to our knowledge of metacognition in humans. We show that although humans and LLMs can sometimes appear quite aligned in their metacognitive capacities and behaviors, it is clear many differences remain; attending to these differences is important for enhancing the collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence. Last, we discuss how endowing future LLMs with more sensitive and more calibrated metacognition may also help them develop new capacities such as more efficient learning, self-direction, and curiosity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it