Self-Monitoring

“Just as regulatory agencies cannot enforce laws without actually monitoring whether companies are adhering to them, human self-regulatory systems cannot adequately control their behavior without some degree of awareness of the ongoing operations of the system.”¹

Self-monitoring is “the evaluation of one’s own behavior in order to determine when a different approach is necessary, including noticing and fixing mistakes, knowing when help is required, and understanding when a task is completed,”² which includes having “an awareness of one’s own social behavior and the effect this might have on others.”³

There are several types of self-monitoring, including:

Performance Monitoring, which alerts “the cognitive control system when increased control is required to achieve acceptable performance levels.”¹ Sub-processes include:

• Error Monitoring – the detection of errors one commits¹
• Outcome Monitoring – “evaluating whether outcomes are worse than expected”¹
• Conflict Monitoring – when competing stimulus information activates the error monitoring and other self-monitoring cognitive processes.⁴ (though the existence of conflict monitoring as a unique process is contested.⁵)

Metacognition or metacognitive/cognitive monitoring, which is the conscious awareness of one’s own current cognitive activity^.3 It includes:

• Uncertainty monitoring – the evaluation of a “subjective sense of certainty about the likely accuracy of a response or decision.”¹
• Attention monitoring – evaluating if one’s attention is where it should be at any given time.⁶
• Interoception – “Subjective awareness of one’s physiological, emotional, and cognitive states”¹

Across the Lifespan

Self-monitoring starts early, with cognitive monitoring emerging at preschool age. These skills improve throughout childhood and adolescence, with a notable effect of social contexts increasing error monitoring in early to mid adolescence, though by older adolescence error monitoring does not appear to have notable differences between social and non-social contexts.¹ The development of self-monitoring abilities “have a profound impact on the development of self-regulation, helping children to detect instances when they should proceed with caution and providing them with the motivation to adjust their actions as necessary to ensure adequate performance in changing contexts.”¹

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