Age differences in the accuracy of confidence judgments

Age differences in accuracy were investigated by having older (M = 68.6 years) and younger (M = 21.5 years) adults make confidence judgments about the correctness of their responses to two sets of general knowledge items. For one set, prior to making their confidence judgments, subjects made mental strategy judgements indicating how they had selected their answers (i.e., they guessed, used intuition, made an inference, or immediately recognized the response as correct). Results indicate that older subjects were more accurate than younger subjects in predicting the correctness of their responses; however, making mental strategy judgments did not result in increased accuracy for either age group. Additional analyses explored the relationship between accuracy and other individual difference variables. The results of this investigation are consistent with recent theories of postformal cognitive development that suggest older adults have greater insight into the limitations of their knowledge.     

Metamemory through the adult life span.

Metamemory is accurate if it returns correct information about the contents in store. It is efficient if it appropriately controls search durations so that more time is allocated to seeking information actually present, and less to information actually absent. 36 adults in 3 age groups (19–22, 44–53, and 65–74 yrs) answered questions on heterogeneous topics, and their responses were timed. Next, metamemorial judgments were made for each S's set of unanswered questions. The same items were then attempted in multiple-choice format, and confidence ratings in the answers were taken. All age groups showed comparable ability to retrieve answers from memory. All showed accurate and efficient metamemory, with no age differences in either. A signal detection analysis raised the possibility that metamemorial sensitivity increases with age. The data also suggest caution among the elderly in suppressing available but low-confidence answers. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Realism in eyewitness confidence as a function of type of event witnessed and repeated recall.

This study investigated how the type of event witnessed and a repeated test schedule for confidence influenced the realism in confidence judgments. The experimental design contrasted 2 film versions (a violent and a nonviolent scenario) and 3 tests of confidence (immediate, repeated, and delayed). On average, for all single items, participants were highly overconfident in their judgments. However, the same participants severely underestimated their own performance when they, at the end of the test session, were asked to provide an estimate of how many questions they thought they had answered correctly. Whereas the effects on realism in confidence for the 2 different film versions were small, the realism in witnesses' confidence judgments increased when participants repeated their confidence ratings. The theoretical and forensical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Confidence in Individual and Group Decision Making: When "Two Heads" Are Worse Than One.

The authors investigated students' accuracy and confidence judgments for course-related material in college classrooms. Under conditions of group work and instructor feedback, students produced higher exam accuracy scores working in groups than alone but at a cost of increased confidence for groups' wrong answers. Groups' high confidence for wrong answers generated the case when "two heads are worse than one." Students participating in groups that arrived at wrong exam answers gave higher confidence when wrong and lower confidence when correct for repeated items on a final exam. "Two heads" groups when wrong had no adverse effect on students' accuracy for repeated exam items. An intervention of lecture and readings on confidence calibration, metamemory, and overconfidence did not improve the students' accuracy-confidence judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Subjective confidence in one's answers: The consensuality principle.

In answering general-information questions, a within-person confidence-accuracy (C-A) correlation is typically observed, suggesting that people can monitor the correctness of their knowledge. However, because the correct answer is generally the consensual answer--the one endorsed by most participants--confidence judgment may actually monitor the consensuality of the answer rather than its correctness. Indeed, the C-A correlation was positive for items with a consensually correct answer but negative for items with a consensually wrong answer. Results suggest that the consensuality-confidence correlation may be mediated by 2 internal mnemonic cues that are correlated with consensuality: Consensual answers are reached faster and are selected more consistently by the same person on different occasions than nonconsensual answers. The results argue against a direct-access view of confidence judgments and suggest that such judgments will be accurate only as long as people's responses are by and large correct across the sampled items, thus stressing the criticality of a representative design. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural influences on confidence: Country and gender.

The objective of the present investigation was to extend research on metamemory and confidence calibration and discrimination to other countries using items from actual course examinations. The authors investigated gender differences in confidence judgments of 551 postsecondary students from 25 university courses in 5 countries: Israel, the Netherlands, Palestine, Taiwan, and the United States. Because important distinctions between men and women and among various countries might be hidden by examining only overall confidence, the authors analyzed students' confidence both when they were correct on each exam item and when they were incorrect. Large and significant differences were found in overall confidence, confidence when correct, and confidence when wrong, associated primarily with country and culture. In contrast, gender differences tended to be surprisingly small when viewed within countries. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On mental multiplication and age.

In 2 experiments, younger and older adults were presented with simple multiplication problems (e.g., 4?×?7?=?28 and 5?×?3?=?10) for their timed, true or false judgments. All of the effects typically obtained in basic research on mental arithmetic were obtained, that is, reaction time (RT) (1) increased with the size of the problem, (2) was slowed for answers deviating only a small amount from the correct value, and (3) was slowed when related (e.g., 7?×?4?=?21) vs unrelated (e.g., 7?×?4?=?18) answers were presented. Older adults were slower in their judgments. Most important, age did not interact significantly with problem size or split size. The authors suggest that elderly adults' central processes, such as memory retrieval and decision making, did not demonstrate the typical age deficit because of the skilled nature of these processes in simple arithmetic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metamemory judgments of the origin and content of course information: Comparing text and lecture materials.

The accuracy and relations between students' specific and general knowledge of content and origin were examined. Students answered multiple-choice questions derived from the text, lecture, or both sources, decided whether each question originated from one of these sources or from their own conclusions, decided whether they had lecture information in their notes, and rated their confidence in these judgments. The three types of questions were equally difficult to answer but were significantly different in the accuracy and confidence of origin judgments, and confidence in the answers' correctness. Students' origin judgments were equivalent when they correctly and incorrectly answered questions. Students who knew fewer correct answers tended to be more confused about the origin of their knowledge. The dissociation between origin and content knowledge is discussed within M. K. Johnson and C. L. Raye's (see record 1981-06694-001) reality-monitoring model, with emphasis on the inference and retrieval processes involved in judging the origin of one's knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental aspects of the feeling of knowing.

Prior reports that feeling-of-knowing (FOK) accuracy increases through childhood and remains constant during adulthood are inconclusive because (a) they used absolute FOK judgments that can be contaminated by differences in the threshold for claiming to know, (b) they used measures of FOK accuracy that are not invariant across different degrees of recognition-test difficulty, and (c) they did not rule out the possibility that age-related differences in FOK accuracy may be caused by changes in the reliability of FOK judgments. We avoided these methodological problems in two studies by using relative FOK judgments, by computing Goodman-Kruskal gamma coefficients to assess FOK accuracy, and by assessing the test–retest reliability of the subjects' FOK judgments. We found that 6-year-olds had less reliable FOK judgments but greater FOK accuracy than 10-year-olds or 18-year-olds. Moreover, 18- and 70-year-olds had equally reliable FOK judgments and equivalent FOK accuracy. Possible reasons for the greater FOK accuracy of youngsters included their lower rate of commission errors and more frequent recognition of correct answers for their commissions. Implications are drawn for the study of metacognitive development. (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)     

Context, feedback, and the calibration and resolution of confidence in perceptual judgments

The effects of variations in the global task difficulty context on judgmental confidence and confidence calibration were investigated in two experiments requiring perceptual comparisons. In Experiment 1, target judgments of moderate difficulty were embedded in a larger set of more difficult (hard context) or less difficult (easy context) judgments. Decisional response time on the target items was longer in the hard context condition, but there was no effect of difficulty context on target judgment confidence, accuracy, over/underconfidence, calibration, or resolution. In Experiment 2, each subject was exposed to three levels of local judgment difficulty. The global contextual difficulty manipulation involved varying the frequency with which the hard and easy judgments appeared, and the presence or absence of trial-by-trial response feedback was manipulated between subjects. As in Experiment 1, contextual difficulty affected decisional response times but not mean confidence ratings or accuracy. However, we found that providing feedback on a globally difficult task makes calibration worse. Also, resolution (the ability to differentiate correct from incorrect judgments) was found to be superior for easy judgments in a difficult context and for difficult judgments in an easy context. We discuss the implication of these findings for research on confidence and confidence calibration.     

Highly confident but wrong: Gender differences and similarities in confidence judgments.

Although gender differences are fairly consistent when people report their general confidence, much less is known about such differences when individuals assess the degree of confidence they have in their ability to answer any particular test question. The objective of this research was to investigate gender differences in item-specific confidence judgments. Data were collected from 3 psychology courses containing 70 men and 181 women. After answering each item on course exams, students indicated their confidence that their answer to that item was correct. Results showed that gender differences in confidence are dependent on the context (whether items were correct or wrong) and on the domain being tested. Moreover, although both men and women were overconfident, undergraduate men were especially overconfident when incorrect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judgements of control over a contingently responsive animation by students with and without learning disabilities.

Examined relations between locus of control (LOC) orientation and assessments of contingencies between one's actions and changes in a simple computerized display. 35 learning disabled students (LDSs; mean age 13.8 yrs) and 23 nondisabled students (NDSs; mean age 13.7 yrs), all males, participated. The Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Scale and the reading subtest (level 2) of the Wide Range Achievement Test–Revised measured LOC and achievement level. LDSs were less sensitive to response probabilities in making judgments of control and expressed greater, and more uniform, confidence in those ratings than did NDSs. These differences were not related to LOC orientation nor the amount of information available to Ss prior to making their judgments. These 2 groups also showed different effects of the presence of random changes as measured both by control judgments and confidence in those judgments. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in feeling-of-knowing and confidence judgments as a function of knowledge domain.

For two semantic knowledge domains, general and computer-related, feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and confidence level (CL) ratings and their relative accuracy were assessed in young, middle-aged, and older adults, after test difficulty was equated across age groups. Global memory self-efficacy beliefs were also assessed for each domain. As expected, greater age was associated with poorer memory self-efficacy beliefs only in the computer domain. The oldest two groups were found to be more underconfident than young adults when rating their FOK but not their CL, for computer items but not for general items. Statistical control of age differences in memory self-efficacy beliefs in the relevant domain greatly reduced this age effect on computer-related FOK ratings. This finding suggests that absolute FOK judgments are more closely related to memory self-efficacy beliefs than are CL judgments. Gamma correlations between judgments and recognition performance revealed that all age groups were equally accurate in FOK and in CL judgments, in both domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fast and confident: Postdicting eyewitness identification accuracy in a field study.

The combined postdictive value of postdecision confidence, decision time, and Remember-Know-Familiar (RKF) judgments as markers of identification accuracy was evaluated with 10 targets and 720 participants. In a pedestrian area, passers-by were asked for directions. Identifications were made from target-absent or target-present lineups. Fast (optimum time boundary at 6 seconds) and confident (optimum confidence boundary at 90%) witnesses were highly accurate, slow and nonconfident witnesses highly inaccurate. Although this combination of postdictors was clearly superior to using either postdictor by itself these combinations refer only to a subsample of choosers. Know answers were associated with higher identification performance than Familiar answers, with no difference between Remember and Know answers. The results of participants' post hoc decision time estimates paralleled those with measured decision times. To explore decision strategies of nonchoosers, three subgroups were formed according to their reasons given for rejecting the lineup. Nonchoosers indicating that the target had simply been absent made faster and more confident decisions than nonchoosers stating lack of confidence or lack of memory. There were no significant differences with regard to identification performance across nonchooser groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A multiprocess account of hindsight bias in children.

In hindsight, that is, after receiving the correct answers to difficult questions, people's recall of their own prior answers tends to be biased toward the correct answers. We tested 139 participants from 3 age groups (9- and 12-year-olds and adults) in a hindsight-bias paradigm and found that all groups showed hindsight bias. Multinomial model-based analyses indicated that all age groups used the correct answers to reconstruct their original answers. In addition, the youngest group showed memory impairment caused by the presentation of the correct answers as well as an increased belief that they knew the correct answers all along. These results support a multiprocess explanation of hindsight bias in children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Regulation of memory accuracy with multiple answers: The plurality option.

We report two experiments that investigated the regulation of memory accuracy with a new regulatory mechanism: the plurality option. This mechanism is closely related to the grain-size option but involves control over the number of alternatives contained in an answer rather than the quantitative boundaries of a single answer. Participants were presented with a slideshow depicting a robbery (Experiment 1) or a murder (Experiment 2), and their memory was tested with five-alternative multiple-choice questions. For each question, participants were asked to generate two answers: a single answer consisting of one alternative and a plural answer consisting of the single answer and two other alternatives. Each answer was rated for confidence (Experiment 1) or for the likelihood of being correct (Experiment 2), and one of the answers was selected for reporting. Results showed that participants used the plurality option to regulate accuracy, selecting single answers when their accuracy and confidence were high, but opting for plural answers when they were low. Although accuracy was higher for selected plural than for selected single answers, the opposite pattern was evident for confidence or likelihood ratings. This dissociation between confidence and accuracy for selected answers was the result of marked overconfidence in single answers coupled with underconfidence in plural answers. We hypothesize that these results can be attributed to overly dichotomous metacognitive beliefs about personal knowledge states that cause subjective confidence to be extreme. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unwanted thought: Age differences in the correction of social judgments.

This study used a false information paradigm to study age differences in the correction of social judgments. Younger and older adults read 2 criminal reports, with true information printed in black and false information in red. Following the reports, all participants were asked to recommend prison terms among other ratings. Age differences in baseline measures were also assessed by corresponding control groups who read only true information. Compared with younger adults under full attention, older adults under full attention and younger adults under divided attention were reliably influenced by the nature of the false statements (either extenuating or exacerbating the severity of the crimes). When contrasted with their relevant control groups, older adults under full attention and younger adults under divided attention failed to correct their social judgments. This study lends support to a processing resource explanation for age differences in the correction process for social judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

People's hypercorrection of high-confidence errors: Did they know it all along?

This study investigated the “knew it all along” explanation of the hypercorrection effect. The hypercorrection effect refers to the finding that when people are given corrective feedback, errors that are committed with high confidence are easier to correct than low-confidence errors. Experiment 1 showed that people were more likely to claim that they knew it all along when they were given the answers to high-confidence errors as compared with low-confidence errors. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated whether people really did know the correct answers before being told or whether the claim in Experiment 1 was mere hindsight bias. Experiment 2 showed that (a) participants were more likely to choose the correct answer in a 2nd guess multiple-choice test when they had expressed an error with high rather than low confidence and (b) that they were more likely to generate the correct answers to high-confidence as compared with low-confidence errors after being told they were wrong and to try again. Experiment 3 showed that (c) people were more likely to produce the correct answer when given a 2-letter cue to high- rather than low-confidence errors and that (d) when feedback was scaffolded by presenting the target letters 1 by 1, people needed fewer such letter prompts to reach the correct answers when they had committed high- rather than low-confidence errors. These results converge on the conclusion that when people said that they knew it all along, they were right. This knowledge, no doubt, contributes to why they are able to correct those high-confidence errors so easily. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The conscious, the unconscious, and familiarity.

This article examines the role of subjective familiarity in the implicit and explicit learning of artificial grammars. Experiment 1 found that objective measures of similarity (including fragment frequency and repetition structure) predicted ratings of familiarity, that familiarity ratings predicted grammaticality judgments, and that the extremity of familiarity ratings predicted confidence. Familiarity was further shown to predict judgments in the absence of confidence, hence contributing to above-chance guessing. Experiment 2 found that confidence developed as participants refined their knowledge of the distribution of familiarity and that differences in familiarity could be exploited prior to confidence developing. Experiment 3 found that familiarity was consciously exploited to make grammaticality judgments including those made without confidence and that familiarity could in some instances influence participants' grammaticality judgments apparently without their awareness. All 3 experiments found that knowledge distinct from familiarity was derived only under deliberate learning conditions. The results provide decisive evidence that familiarity is the essential source of knowledge in artificial grammar learning while also supporting a dual-process model of implicit and explicit learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)