The mismeasure of memory: When retrieval fluency is misleading as a metamnemonic index.

The experiments address the degree to which retrieval fluency—the ease with which information is accessed from long-term memory—guides and occasionally misleads metamnemonic judgments. In each of 3 experiments, participants' predictions of their own future recall performance were examined under conditions in which probability or speed of retrieval at one time or on one task is known to be negatively related to retrieval probability on a later task. Participants' predictions reflected retrieval fluency on the initial task in each case, which led to striking mismatches between their predicted and actual performance on the later tasks. The results suggest that retrieval fluency is a potent but not necessarily reliable source of information for metacognitive judgments. Aspects of the results suggest that a basis on which better and poorer rememberers differ is the degree to which certain memory dynamics are understood, such as the fleeting nature of recency effects and the consequences of an initial retrieval. The results have pedagogical as well as theoretical implications, particularly with respect to the education of subjective assessments of ongoing learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context affects feeling-of-knowing accuracy in younger and older adults.

In feeling of knowing (FOK) studies, participants predict subsequent recognition memory performance on items that were initially encoded but that cannot presently be recalled. Research suggests that FOK judgment magnitude may be influenced by the total amount, or quantity, of contextual information retrieved related to the unrecalled target (e.g., Koriat, 1993). The present study examined the contribution of quality of that information to episodic FOK judgments. In addition, we tested whether the episodic FOK deficit demonstrated by older adults could be reduced by encouraging retrieval of contextual information relevant to the target. Three experiments demonstrated that quality of the retrieved partial information influenced FOK judgments in both older and younger adults; however, the manifestation of that influence was age dependent. The results also indicated that older adults required explicit retrieval of contextual information before making FOK judgments in order to make accurate FOK predictions. The results suggest that FOK accuracy may be partially determined by search processes triggered when participants are queried for contextual information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Who said what? An event-related potential investigation of source and item memory.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during recognition tasks for spoken words alone (items) or for both words and the voice of the speaker (sources). Neither performance nor ERP measures suggested that voice information was retrieved automatically during the item-recognition task. In both tasks, correctly recognized old words elicited more positive ERPs than new words, beginning around 400 ms poststimulus onset. In the source task only, old words also elicited a focal prefrontal positivity beginning about 700 ms. The prefrontal task effect did not distinguish trials with accurate and inaccurate voice judgments and is interpreted as reflecting the search for voice information in memory. More posterior recording sites were sensitive to the successful recovery of voice or source information. The results indicate that word and voice information were retrieved hierarchically and distinguish retrieval attempt from retrieval success. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do I see only what I expect? Evidence for an expectancy-guided retrieval model.

The article proposes an expectancy-guided retrieval model of memory reconstruction. In all 3 experiments, Ss were presented with a student's grade report that they would later have to recall. As predicted by the model, the results of Experiment 1 indicate that Ss' recall was significantly influenced both by manipulations of Ss' expectancies about the student's future performance and by manipulations of outcome information. The results of Experiment 2 show that Ss were sensitive to variations in the original information, indicating the use of expectancy-guided retrieval rather than simply expectancy-based inference or guessing. However, the results of Experiment 3 indicate that the proposed retrieval process (resulting in expectancy-consistent recall) is not inevitable; retrieval accuracy was significantly improved by giving Ss either an alternative retrieval strategy, a monetary incentive, or both manipulations. The possible cognitive and motivational components mediating Ss' use of the proposed retrieval strategy are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do prospective workday appraisals influence end-of-workday affect and self-monitored performance?

The current study uses self-regulation as the basis for a model that examines the influence of three types of workday appraisals (resource, task, and response). At the beginning of their workday, a total of 170 faculty, graduate students, and staff of a university completed appraisal ratings of their anticipated workday tasks, resources, and responses. At the end of the workday, they completed assessments of positive and negative affect and self-monitored performance. Results suggested that resource appraisals of control and skills were predictive of task appraisals of difficulty, threat, and ambiguity. Task appraisals were then predictive of both response appraisals, in terms of anticipated support and effort, and self-monitored performance at the end of the day. Anticipated effort and self-monitored performance were both positively related to positive affect at the end of the day. Anticipated support and self-monitored performance were both negatively related to negative affect at the end of the day, while threat task appraisals were positively related to negative affect. Implications of the results for workplace interventions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social explanation: The role of timing, set, and recall on subjective likelihood estimates.

471 undergraduates, selected for interest in and knowledge of college football, read information about an upcoming football game and explained a hypothetical victory by 1 team. Some Ss knew of the outcome to be explained prior to reading the information. Others learned of the explanation task only after reading the information. Of these latter Ss, some were given an initial recall set with which to approach the information; others were given an impression set. Results show that explaining a victory by a team biased judgments of what would happen, but only in the before- and the after-recall set conditions. In both cases, judgments were highly correlated with the kinds of facts recalled. In the after-impression set condition, judgments were not biased in the direction of the outcome explained, and the correlations between judgments and what was recalled were small. It is proposed that judgments may be based either on facts available in memory at the time of judgment (for before- and after-recall set conditions) or on the basis of previous summary impressions (after-impression set condition). Implications for issues of encoding vs retrieval effects and the evaluative judgment–recall relationship are discussed. (47 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive categorization and quality of performance ratings.

The effects of cognitive categorization of raters on accuracy, leniency, and halo of performance evaluations were investigated in a field setting. One hundered seventy-four subordinates evaluated the performance of their managers on three performance dimensions. Managers were categorized as congruent or incongruent based on subordinates' perceptions of the extent to which the manager's behavior met the subordinates' expectations. The results indicated that the quality of ratings assigned by subordinates was related to the cognitive categories used. As hypothesized, ratings of managers who were categorized as congruent were found to be more accurate and also to contain more leniency and halo tendency than the ratings of managers who were categorized as incongruent. Implications of these findings for performance-appraisal research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identity negotiation in roommate relationships: The self as architect and consequence of social reality.

Report 2 longitudinal studies of new college roommates (N?=?69 and 95 pairs). In both studies, targets' initial self-views predicted changes in perceivers' appraisals of them, and perceivers' initial appraisals predicted changes in targets' self-views, although relatively few dyads displayed both effects. The perceiver-driven and target-driven effects occurred when appraisals and self-views were negative as well as positive. Implications for self-verification theory and symbolic interactionism are discussed, and a less restrictive model of how appraisals influence self-views is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in memory retrieval shift: Governed by feeling-of-knowing?

The noun-pair lookup (NP) task was used to evaluate strategic shift from visual scanning to retrieval. We investigated whether age differences in feeling-of-knowing (FOK) account for older adults' delayed retrieval shift. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) standard NP learning, (2) fast binary FOK judgments, or (3) Choice, where participants had to choose in advance whether to see the look-up table or respond from memory. We found small age differences in FOK magnitudes but major age differences in memory retrieval choices that mirrored retrieval use in the standard NP task. Older adults showed lower resolution in their confidence judgments (CJs) for recognition memory tests on the NP items, and this difference appeared to influence rates of retrieval shift, given that retrieval use was correlated with CJ magnitudes in both age groups. Older adults had particular difficulty with accuracy and confidence for rearranged pairs, relative to intact pairs. Older adults' slowed retrieval shift appears to be attributable to (1) impaired associative learning early in practice, not just a lower FOK; but also (2) retrieval reluctance later in practice after the degree of associative learning would afford memory-based responding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Binding of multidimensional context information as a distinctive characteristic of remember judgments.

This research investigated the cognitive processes underlying remember-know judgments in terms of contextual binding in multidimensional source memory. Stochastic dependence between the retrieval of different context attributes, which formed the empirical criterion of binding, was observed for remembered items but not for known items. Experiment 1 showed that the qualitative difference in the stochastic relation holds even if quantitative source-memory performance is equated for items with remember and know judgments. Experiment 2 generalized the findings to context information from different modalities, and Experiment 3 ruled out a spurious stochastic dependence due to interindividual differences. Supporting recent dual-process models of remember-know judgments, the findings show that remember and know judgments differ with respect to binding processes that correspond to episodic recollection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anchoring, efficacy, and action: The influence of judgmental heuristics on self-efficacy judgments and behavior.

Two experiments addressed relations between judgmental processes and action by examining both the impact of the anchoring/adjustment heuristic on judgments of performance capabilities and the subsequent impact of these self-efficacy judgments on behavior. In Exp I, 62 undergraduates judged their capabilities for performance on a problem-solving task after exposure to ostensibly random anchor values representing either high or low levels of performance. Ss in a control condition received no anchor values. Anchoring biases strongly affected self-efficacy judgments. High-anchor Ss evidenced the highest judgments of their capabilities and low-anchor Ss the lowest judgments. Ss then performed the task. Differences in task persistence paralleled the differences in self-efficacy judgments, with high-anchor Ss displaying the highest level of task persistence. Exp II, with 23 high school students, replicated these results. In both studies, self-efficacy was predictive of both between-group differences and variations in performance within the anchoring conditions. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Role of the rater in performance appraisal.

Notes that ratings for performance appraisal are frequently made by supervisors. In the present study, judgments of effectiveness for 153 hospital nurses were obtained from the nurse herself and her peers in addition to her supervisor, using the same rating form. Factor analysis indicated that each rating source could be clearly identified and characterized. The data reaffirm the notion that interrater disagreement may reflect systematic rater bias as well as meaningful differences in the ways in which judgments are made. Implications for comprehensive appraisals are suggested. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are you sure you forgot? Feeling of knowing in directed forgetting.

One significant issue in metamemory is how variables increasing memorability affect metamemory. Previous research has produced inconsistent results. The effect of directed forgetting on the magnitude and accuracy of feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments was investigated. Participants were presented with word pairs, some to be remembered and some to be forgotten, and then were asked to recall all target words regardless of initial instructions. For unrecalled items, they were asked to give FOK judgments about performance in a future memory task: a cued stem-completion task (Experiment 1) or a recognition test (Experiment 2). This encoding manipulation increased both the memory performance and the magnitude of FOK judgments. However, no such effect on the accuracy of FOK judgments was observed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhalation of 30% nitrous oxide impairs people's learning without impairing people's judgments of what will be remembered.

Many hypotheses have been proposed to account for the effects of nitrous oxide on memory, with one emerging possibility being that it has a global effect on memory-related functioning. This possibility was explored by examining the effects of nitrous oxide on memory performance and on the accuracy of people's judgments about their memory performance. Participants inhaled 30% nitrous oxide or a placebo gas while items were studied and while judgments were made about the likelihood of recall for each item. Next, all participants inhaled the placebo during paired-associate recall. Although administration of nitrous oxide during study impaired recall, it did not affect the predictive accuracy of the metacognitive judgments. These results provide pharmacological evidence for a distinction between memory and metamemory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental space travel: Damage to posterior parietal cortex prevents egocentric navigation and reexperiencing of remote spatial memories.

The ability to navigate in a familiar environment depends on both an intact mental representation of allocentric spatial information and the integrity of systems supporting complementary egocentric representations. Although the hippocampus has been implicated in learning new allocentric spatial information, converging evidence suggests that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) might support egocentric representations. To date, however, few studies have examined long-standing egocentric representations of environments learned long ago. Here we tested 7 patients with focal lesions in PPC and 12 normal controls in remote spatial memory tasks, including 2 tasks reportedly reliant on allocentric representations (distance and proximity judgments) and 2 tasks reportedly reliant on egocentric representations (landmark sequencing and route navigation; see Rosenbaum, Ziegler, Winocur, Grady, & Moscovitch, 2004). Patients were unimpaired in distance and proximity judgments. In contrast, they all failed in route navigation, and left-lesioned patients also showed marginally impaired performance in landmark sequencing. Patients' subjective experience associated with navigation was impoverished and disembodied compared with that of the controls. These results suggest that PPC is crucial for accessing remote spatial memories within an egocentric reference frame that enables both navigation and reexperiencing. Additionally, PPC was found to be necessary to implement specific aspects of allocentric navigation with high demands on spontaneous retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neural correlates of individual differences in strategic retrieval processing.

Processes engaged when information is encoded into memory are an important determinant of whether that information will be recovered subsequently. Also influential, however, are processes engaged at the time of retrieval, and these were investigated here by using event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure a specific class of retrieval operations. These operations were revealed by contrasts between ERPs elicited by new (unstudied) test items in distinct tasks, the assumption being that these contrasts index operations that are engaged in service of retrieval and that vary according to the demands of different retrieval tasks. Specific functional accounts of this class of retrieval processing operations assume that they influence the accuracy of memory judgments, and this experiment was designed to test for the first time whether this is in fact the case. Toward this end, participants completed 2 retrieval tasks while ERPs were acquired, and the extent to which processes were engaged differentially across tasks in service of retrieval was operationalized as the magnitude of the differences between the new-item ERPs that were elicited. This measure correlated positively with response accuracy on the tasks, which provides strong evidence that this class of retrieval processing operations benefits the accuracy of memory judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of alcohol intoxication on metamemory and on retrieval from long-term memory.

In a balanced-placebo design, 160 male moderate to heavy drinkers (aged 21–35 yrs) expected either an alcohol drink or placebo drink and consumed either alcohol (1 ml/kg) or placebo. Shortly thereafter, each S attempted to recall the answers to general-information questions (e.g., "What is the capital of Chile?"), made confidence judgments about the accuracy of recall, made feeling-of-knowing judgments on all nonrecalled items, and received a recognition test. Unanticipated outcomes included the following: (a) Alcohol intoxication significantly hindered recall from long-term memory, contrary to previous conclusions that alcohol does not affect retrieval; (b) Ss' expectancy of alcohol had no significant effect on memory or metamemory performance, contrary to its established effects on other kinds of performance; (c) Alcohol intoxication produced no significant overconfidence in judgments about recall or in feeling-of-knowing judgments, contrary to the overconfidence produced in other kinds of judgments such as an intoxicated person's assessment of his/her driving ability. This last outcome implies that alcohol intoxication does not produce a general lowering of the threshold for confidence but rather has effects that are situation specific. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting the future and reconstructing the past: a Bayesian characterization of the utility of subjective fluency

The subjective sense of fluency with which an item can be perceived or remembered is proposed to be a vital cue in making decisions about the future memorability and the nature of our past experience with that stimulus. We first outline a number of cases in which such perceptual or retrieval fluency influences judgments both about our own future performance and our likely past experience, and then present a Bayesian analysis of how judgments of recognition--deciding whether or not a currently viewed item was studied at a particular point in the past--may incorporate information about the perceptual fluency of that item. Using a simple mathematical model, we then provide an interpretation of certain enigmatic phenomena in recognition memory.