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What is metamemory?

This post is a short extract from the book I am researching and writing with Gianfranco Conti. It's about metamemory. I'd never heard of this term until I began to read more extensively about memory.

Metamemory is a branch of metacognition. If metacognition is "thinking about thinking", then metamemory is "thinking about memory". It's about our beliefs about memory. For example, famously, many students think that cramming revision into one long session will help them remember better than doing little bits of revision, spaced out over time. In this case, their metamemory has let them down, since they are wrong, as much research clearly shows.

What else is useful to know about metamemory?

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