We describe the current state of world-class memory competitions, including the methods used to prepare for and compete in memory competitions, based on the subjective report of World Memory Championship Grandmaster and co-author Nelson Dellis. We then explore the reported experiences through the lens of the Simulated, Situated, and Structurally coherent Qualia (S3Q) theory of consciousness, in order to propose a set of experiments to help further understand the boundaries of expert memory performance.

Computational metacognition represents a cognitive systems perspective on high-order reasoning in integrated artificial systems that seeks to leverage ideas from human metacognition and from metareasoning approaches in artificial intelligence. The key characteristic is to declaratively represent and then monitor traces of cognitive activity in an intelligent system in order to manage the performance of cognition itself. Improvements in cognition then lead to improvements in behavior and thus performance. We illustrate these concepts with an agent implementation in a cognitive architecture called MIDCA and show the value of metacognition in problem-solving. The results illustrate how computational metacognition improves performance by changing cognition through meta-level goal operations and learning.