Self-Monitoring – How Does It Work

“[Self-monitoring] codevelops with inhibition as neither makes any sense in the absence of the other. One cannot inhibit an automatic action if one is not aware of or attending to his or her own behavior, and there is little point to self- monitoring more automatic behavior if it cannot be inhibited or interrupted so as to make it more consistent with a longer-term goal.”¹

The development of self-monitoring mirrors the development of not only the related brain structures and circuits, but also the gradual learning of “reliable heuristic cues,” which allow children to make connections between their internal and external experiences and consequences, and then be able to evaluate their behavior against that experience later. It appears that while external cues (i.e. feedback) guides monitoring in young children, as they old their monitoring becomes more dependent on their own internal processes. As well, when children get older, their motivation for accurate self-monitoring also increases, further encouraging the process.²

One way in which self-monitoring is facilitated is by the increase in autonomic arousal which happens when we reflect on our own behaviors. That arousal then creates a “state of physiological preparedness that facilitates the intake of information from the environment.”³ This arousal is especially increased when the mistakes are made in social environments with people there to observe any possible mistakes, or when correct responses or rewarded.⁴

As for interoception,

“Alternatively, Craig (2002, 2009) has argued that by integrating neural signals from all of the inputs that the body receives at a given moment, including physiological sensations (e.g., hunger, satiation, pain), emotional experiences (e.g., empathic concern), motor and proprioceptive experiences (e.g., body movement), motivational sensations (e.g., reward signals), as well as environmental input (e.g., cues concerning social or physical risk), the insula generates a “meta-representation of the ‘global emotional moment’” (Craig, 2009, p. 67), giving rise to a personal sense of agency and subjective sense of knowing oneself” ²

While self-monitoring can be a conscious and deliberate process, often “individuals seem to automatically regulate their actions with little conscious deliberation,”² and it seems that “metacognitive monitoring operations might guide metacognitive control at a relatively implicit level.”²

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