Metamemory
Your knowledge of, and ability to monitor and control, your own memory.
What it means
Metamemory is the subset of metacognition concerned with awareness, monitoring, and regulation of one's own memory processes — judging what one knows, how well something has been learned, and how to direct study and retrieval. It comprises monitoring components such as judgments of learning and feeling-of-knowing, and control components such as deciding what to restudy or when to stop searching. Accurate metamemory improves learning by steering effort toward weak material, while systematic illusions — like overconfidence from fluency — misdirect it. The field formalizes how subjective experiences of memory guide behavior, often imperfectly. It connects basic memory research to education and self-regulated learning.
Examples
Choosing to spend more time on the chapters you judge you've learned least is metamemory in action.
Stuck on a quiz question, you know instantly whether the name is on the tip of your tongue and worth another moment, or simply not there — so you stop searching and move on.
Writing a shopping list because you know six unrelated items will not stick, while never writing down your PIN because you know it will, is metamemory quietly setting the strategy.
First described in Term: John Flavell (1971); framework by Nelson & Narens (1990).