Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
This article is concerned with the issue of metaknowledge, that is, how people determine what they know about a question before they actually answer it. In particular, is it necessary to search memory in order to ascertain whether an answer is likely to be known? Although it might seem reasonable that people first search their memory for an answer before trying some other question-answering strategy, such as figuring out the answer, there is evidence that this is not the case (e.g., Portions of this work were initially presented at the Psychonomics Conference, Chicago, November 1988
Reder et al. (Fri,) studied this question.