Meta-Reasoning: Prof. Rakefet Ackerman takes part in developing the Meta-Reasoning research domain. This domain deals with the metacognitive processes involved in reasoning and problem solving. She is interested in factors that may bias people’s confidence regarding their problem solutions and the effort they invest when facing cognitive challenges. For instance, what guides people in their decisions to invest additional effort or to cease investing effort.
Several ongoing studies deal with medical diagnosis as a reasoning challenge medical staff face with and also use meta-reasoning principles to consider differences between populations with and without certain diagnoses.
Metacognitive aspects of Human-Computer Interaction: Prof. Ackerman’s research deals with the challenges people face when working and learning in online environments. Her research aims to explain why people show screen inferiority when learning online relative to learning in traditional ways, it provides tools for analyzing usability of computerized applications, it explains the processes that guide people in investing efforts in web search, etc.
Answering challenging questions: When facing challenging questions people engage in regulatory decisions in addition to retrieving information from memory. Prof. Ackerman studies when people answer by “I don’t know”, seek for external help, and recall their previous answers.
In all lines of research, ongoing studies consider how to improve thinking efficiency.