Generative AI (GenAI) systems offer unprecedented opportunities for transforming professional and personal work, yet present challenges around prompting, evaluating and relying on outputs, and optimizing workflows. We argue that metacognition$\unicode{x2013}$the psychological ability to monitor and control one's thoughts and behavior$\unicode{x2013}$offers a valuable lens to understand and design for these usability challenges. Drawing on research in psychology and cognitive science, and recent GenAI user studies, we illustrate how GenAI systems impose metacognitive demands on users, requiring a high degree of metacognitive monitoring and control. We propose these demands could be addressed by integrating metacognitive support strategies into GenAI systems, and by designing GenAI systems to reduce their metacognitive demand by targeting explainability and customizability. Metacognition offers a coherent framework for understanding the usability challenges posed by GenAI, enabling us to offer research and design directions to advance human-GenAI interaction.

翻译：生成式人工智能（GenAI）系统为转变专业和个人工作提供了前所未有的机遇，但也带来了关于提示、评估与依赖输出以及优化工作流程的挑战。我们认为，元认知（监控和调节自身思想与行为的心理能力）为理解和设计这些可用性挑战提供了宝贵视角。基于心理学和认知科学研究以及近期GenAI用户研究，我们阐述了GenAI系统如何对用户施加元认知需求，要求高度运用元认知监控与调节。我们提出，可通过在GenAI系统中集成元认知支持策略，并降低其元认知需求（如提升可解释性与可定制性）来应对这些挑战。元认知为理解GenAI带来的可用性挑战提供了一个连贯框架，使我们能够提出推动人机交互发展的研究与设计方向。