Abstract: This article presented a study of on-line metacognitive regulation in cognitive tasks, in which the characteristics of on-line cognitive regulating ability and its domain-generality were discussed. Two cognitive tasks of Letter Recall and Key Strike were used for inducing the regulating process. By increasing the “task cues” gradually, some changes were observed in the performance in Letter Recall task and performance enhancement in Key Strike task. Using them as the index of on-line metacognitive regulating ability, analysis of the result indicated that cognitive performance was enhanced through on-line metacognitive regulation as task cues increased. It was also showed that the on-line metacognitive regulating ability assessed by cognitive tasks was consistent with that came from retrospective report. The on-line metacognitive regulation was both domain-general across different tasks and domain-specific in discovering the rules. These results implied that metacognitive assessment under cognitive context could appropriately assess the on-line metacognitive regulation

Key words: on-line, metacognitive regulation, cognitive tasks