Boundedly Insightful: Metacognitive monitoring and control in memory-based choices

Insight—awareness of the cognitive limitations underlying one's own bounded rationality—has been recognized as a critical countermeasure to the suboptimal decision-making it causes. Yet, little attention has been given to how decision-makers develop such insight, limiting our ability to explain and predict when it arises, how accurate it is, and how it informs compensatory behavior. Here we contribute by examining how decision-makers monitor and control decision errors in open-ended decisions that require self-generated options, drawing on research on the metacognition of memory. We show that “feeling-of-knowing” (FOK) serves as a cognitive mechanism providing well-calibrated insight into option generation failures. However, information search is influenced not only by FOK but also by irrelevant metacognitive judgments about one’s overall expertise. These findings advance our understanding of bounded rationality by revealing that insight and its resulting behavior are themselves products of cognitive processes, constrained by their own limitations.