The unconscious feeling of knowing: A commentary on Koriat's paper

In Koriat's paper "The Feeling of Knowing: Some Metatheoretical Implication s for Consciousness and Control," he asserts that the feeling of knowing st raddles the implicit and explicit, and that these conscious feelings enter into a conscious control process that is necessary for controlled behavior. This assertion allows him to make many speculations on the nature of consc iousness itself. We agree that feelings of knowing are produced through a m onitoring of one's knowledge, and that this monitoring can affect the contr ol of behavior such as whether or not to search memory for an answer. Furth er, we believe that monitoring of performance with a strategy can also affe ct cognition control and strategy selection; however, we also believe that frequently this monitoring and control occurs without conscious awareness. Feeling of knowing has received an inordinate amount of attention because i t lies behind the highly recognizable tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon that rep resents one of the rare cases of conscious monitoring. There are other feel ings of knowing which are much more common and are not accompanied by consc ious awareness. These are evident in the early selection of a strategy for answering a problem. In our view, the research on feeling, of knowing will not resolve the question of whether consciousness is merely epiphenomenal. (C) 2000 Academic Press.