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Factors That Influence Metacognitive Judgments: Effects at Encoding, in the Presence of Diagnostic Cues, and After Incidental Encoding

Abstract

People prefer methods that involve subjectively easier and faster processing fluency, and emphasize performance when making judgments about their learning. Studying cue-target pairs feels much easier than seeing a cue and laboring to retrieve an answer, and reading words in larger and clearer fonts feels easier. When people see information (like logos or flags) very often, they tend to think that they are easier to remember and consistently bias their confidence upward. The first set of studies (Chapter 2) examines a current debate in metamemory research regarding the roles of fluency (Rhodes & Castel, 2008a) and belief cues (Mueller, Dunlosky, Tauber, & Rhodes, 2014) in the construction of judgments of learning (JOLs). The results provide clear confirmatory evidence for the effects of belief on JOLs, though these data neither support a pure fluency hypothesis nor a pure belief-based hypothesis. I discuss an additive effect of perceptual fluency and belief on JOLs, and present possible mechanisms that may interact to influence and bias JOLs. In a second set of experiments (Chapter 3), I consider the generalizability of paired-associate learning for foreign-language vocabulary to the medical domain. Results show better cued-recall performance for translations compared to medications, though JOLs are somewhat insensitive to learning. Lastly, research on everyday attention suggests that frequent interaction with objects often does not benefit memory or metamemory for them. Across three experiments in Chapter 4, participants gave confidence judgments and completed eight-alternative forced-choice tests of the US, Canadian, and Mexican flags. In Experiment 1, environmental availability was correlated with confidence for the US flag, despite similar recognition performance at a saturated time point in the US (July 4th) and a neutral time point (Aug. 6th). In Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 I assess two techniques for improving both memory and metamemory for these types of materials. Via a draw–study paradigm, I introduce disfluency to improve performance, demonstrating a powerful metacognitive debiasing intervention and extending theories of errorful learning by highlighting the role of attention.

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