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ABSTRACT: Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (Mage = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders (Mage = 10.39) read texts presented in easy- or difficult-to-encode fonts. The more children in both grades viewed intelligence as fixed, the less likely they were to interpret effortful or difficult encoding as a sign of increasing mastery and the more likely they were to report lower levels of comprehension as their perceived effort increased. This suggests that children may use naive theories of intelligence to make motivationally relevant inferences earlier than previously thought.
Child Development 04/2013; · 4.72 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The cues contributing to people's metacognitions of agency were investigated in two experiments in which people played a computer game that involved trying to "touch", via a mouse moving a cursor, downward scrolling X's (Experiment 1), or trying to "explode" the downward scrolling X's (Experiment 2). Both experiments varied (a) proximal action-related information by either introducing or not introducing Turbulence into the mouse controls and (b) distal outcome-related information such that touched X's "exploded" either 100 or 75 % of the time. Both variables affected people's judgments of agency (JOAs), but the effect was different. First, the decrement in feelings of agency was greater with the proximal variable than with distal variable. Second, while the proximal variable always had a large direct effect on JOAs, even taking judgments of performance (JOPs) into account, JOPs completely accounted for the effect of the distal variable in Experiment 1, where the instructions were just to touch the X's. And even in Experiment 2, in which the instructions were to explode the X's, the direct effect of the distal variable on JOAs was small. These data indicate that these two cues exhibit different psychological profiles. The proximal action-related information is a diagnostic cue to agency indicating the match between one's own intentions and actions. Internal monitoring of intentions is necessary and so the self is implicated. However, distal outcome can be largely monitored using information external to the agent, and so-while it is used by people to make agency judgments-it is a non-diagnostic cue.
Experimental Brain Research 01/2013; · 2.39 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: ABSTRACT The hypercorrection effect, which refers to the finding that errors committed with high confidence are more likely to be corrected than are low confidence errors, has been replicated many times, and with both young adults and children. In the present study, we contrasted older with younger adults. Participants answered general-information questions, made confidence ratings about their answers, were given corrective feedback, and then were retested on questions that they had gotten wrong. While younger adults showed the hypercorrection effect, older adults, despite higher overall accuracy on the general-information questions and excellent basic metacognitive ability, showed a diminished hypercorrection effect. Indeed, the correspondence between their confidence in their errors and the probability of correction was not significantly greater than zero, showing, for the first time, that a particular participant population is selectively impaired on this error correction task. These results potentially offer leverage both on the mechanisms underlying the hypercorrection effect and on reasons for older adults' memory impairments, as well as on memory functions that are spared.
Aging Neuropsychology and Cognition 12/2012; · 1.07 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Despite the intuition that strongly held beliefs are particularly difficult to change, the data on error correction indicate that general information errors that people commit with a high degree of belief are especially easy to correct. This finding is called the hypercorrection effect. The hypothesis was tested that the reason for hypercorrection stems from enhanced attention and encoding that results from a metacognitive mismatch between the person's confidence in their responses and the true answer. This experiment, which is the first to use imaging to investigate the hypercorrection effect, provided support for this hypothesis, showing that both metacognitive mismatch conditions-that in which high confidence accompanies a wrong answer and that in which low confidence accompanies a correct answer-revealed anterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus activations. Only in the high confidence error condition, however, was an error that conflicted with the true answer mentally present. And only the high confidence error condition yielded activations in the right TPJ and the right dorsolateral pFC. These activations suggested that, during the correction process after error commission, people (1) were entertaining both the false belief as well as the true belief (as in theory of mind tasks, which also manifest the right TPJ activation) and (2) may have been suppressing the unwanted, incorrect information that they had, themselves, produced (as in think/no-think tasks, which also manifest dorsolateral pFC activation). These error-specific processes as well as enhanced attention because of metacognitive mismatch appear to be implicated.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 03/2012; 24(7):1571-83. · 5.18 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Producing an error, so long as it is followed by corrective feedback, has been shown to result in better retention of the correct answers than does simply studying the correct answers from the outset. The reasons for this surprising finding, however, have not been investigated. Our hypothesis was that the effect might occur only when the errors produced were related to the targeted correct response. In Experiment 1, participants studied either related or unrelated word pairs, manipulated between participants. Participants either were given the cue and target to study for 5 or 10 s or generated an error in response to the cue for the first 5 s before receiving the correct answer for the final 5 s. When the cues and targets were related, error-generation led to the highest correct retention. However, consistent with the hypothesis, no benefit was derived from generating an error when the cue and target were unrelated. Latent semantic analysis revealed that the errors generated in the related condition were related to the target, whereas they were not related to the target in the unrelated condition. Experiment 2 replicated these findings in a within-participants design. We found, additionally, that people did not know that generating an error enhanced memory, even after they had just completed the task that produced substantial benefits.
Memory & Cognition 12/2011; 40(4):514-27. · 1.92 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Metacognitive methodologies are used to examine the integrity of self-referential processing in healthy adults and have been implemented to study disorders of the self-concept in neurologic and psychiatric populations. However, the extent to which metacognitive evaluations assess a uniquely self-evaluative capacity that cannot be explained fully by primary cognitive functions, demographics, or mood is not clear. The objective of the current study was to examine whether metamemory and a metacognitive test of agency shared a self-referential association that would not be explained by cognition, demographics, or mood.
Thirty-eight nondemented older adults (Mini Mental State Examination [MMSE] ≥24 and mean age = 68.13) participated in metacognitive testing and completed cognitive testing and mood questionnaires. Bivariate correlations were used to evaluate the association between metamemory and agency, and to determine the cognitive (memory, attention, and executive functioning), demographic (age and education), and mood (anxiety and depression) correlates of each. Correlates of metamemory and agency were then entered into linear regression models to determine whether any association between metacognitive measures remained.
Metamemory was associated with agency judgments (n = 27), specifically those on self-controlled rather than computer-controlled trials (r = .41, p = .03). Regression results supported a role for agency in predicting metamemory, above and beyond memory and education (β = .39, p = .034). Metamemory was also an independent predictor of agency judgments (β = .36, p = .049).
The interrelation between metamemory and agency judgments suggests that metacognitive testing captures an important aspect of self-referential processing not otherwise assessed in a standard cognitive evaluation and may provide unique information about self-evaluative capacities in clinical populations.
Neuropsychology 09/2011; 25(5):602-12. · 3.82 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: While humans are adept at recognizing emotional states conveyed by facial expressions, the current literature suggests that they lack accurate metacognitions about their performance in this domain. This finding comes from global trait-based questionnaires that assess the extent to which an individual perceives him or herself as empathic, as compared to other people. Those who rate themselves as empathically accurate are no better than others at recognizing emotions. Metacognition of emotion recognition can also be assessed using relative measures that evaluate how well a person thinks s/he has understood the emotion in a particular facial display as compared to other displays. While this is the most common method of metacognitive assessment of people's judgments of learning or their feelings of knowing, this kind of metacognition--"relative meta-accuracy"--has not been studied within the domain of emotion. As well as asking for global metacognitive judgments, we asked people to provide relative, trial-by-trial prospective and retrospective judgments concerning whether they would be right or wrong in recognizing the expressions conveyed in particular facial displays. Our question was: Do people know when they will be correct in knowing what expression is conveyed, and do they know when they do not know? Although we, like others, found that global meta-accuracy was unpredictive of performance, relative meta-accuracy, given by the correlation between participants' trial-by-trial metacognitive judgments and performance on each item, were highly accurate both on the Mind in the Eyes task (Experiment 1) and on the Ekman Emotional Expression Multimorph task (in Experiment 2).
Emotion 08/2011; 11(4):896-906. · 3.88 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Judgments of agency refer to people's self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring, which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) between observed states and expected states. Presumably, people form judgments of agency by metacognitively reflecting on the output of their action monitoring and then consciously inferring the extent to which they caused the action in question. Although a number of previous imaging studies have been directed at action monitoring, none have assessed judgments of agency as a potentially separate process. The present fMRI study used an agency paradigm that not only allowed us to examine the brain activity associated with action monitoring but that also enabled us to investigate those regions associated with metacognition of agency. Regarding action monitoring, we found that being "out of control" during the task (i.e., detection of a discrepancy between observed and expected states) was associated with increased brain activity in the right TPJ, whereas being "in control" was associated with increased activity in the pre-SMA, rostral cingulate zone, and dorsal striatum (regions linked to self-initiated action). In contrast, when participants made self-reflective metacognitive judgments about the extent of their own control (i.e., judgments of agency) compared with when they made judgments that were not about control (i.e., judgments of performance), increased activity was observed in the anterior PFC, a region associated with self-reflective processing. These results indicate that action monitoring is dissociable from people's conscious self-attributions of control.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 05/2011; 23(11):3620-36. · 5.18 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: 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.
Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition 03/2011; 37(2):437-48. · 2.85 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT) is the feeling that accompanies temporary inaccessibility of an item that a person is trying to retrieve. TOTs have been studied experimentally since the seminal work of Brown and McNeill (1966). TOTs are experiences that accompany some failed or slow retrievals, and they can result in changes in retrieval behavior itself, allowing us to study the interplay among experience, retrieval, and behavior. We often attribute the experience of the TOT to the unretrieved target, but TOTs are based on a variety of cues, heuristics, or sources of evidence, such as partial information, related information, and cue familiarity, that predict the likelihood of overcoming retrieval failure. We present a synthesis of the direct-access view, which accounts for retrieval failure, and the heuristic-metacognitive view, which accounts for the experience of the TOT. We offer several avenues for future research and applications of TOT theory and data.
Memory & Cognition 01/2011; 39(5):737-49. · 1.92 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Memory awareness in early Alzheimer's disease (AD) influences capacity to provide informed consent for a memory treatment. This study investigated the extent to which aspects of memory awareness influence everyday decision-making capacity about medication management in AD. 42 participants with mild AD and 50 healthy elders underwent clinical ratings of memory awareness, metamemory testing, and an interview of everyday decision-making capacity regarding medication management. 45% of AD subjects were classified as aware (AAD) and 55% as unaware (UAD) based on clinical ratings and supported by metamemory testing (P = .015). Capacity was impaired in each of the AD groups as compared to the healthy elders F(2, 67) = 17.63, UAD, P < .01; AAD, P = .01). Within the AD group, capacity correlated selectively with awareness as measured with clinical ratings (r = -.41, P = .007) but not objective metamemory testing (r = -.10, P = .60 ). Appreciation scores were lower in UAD as compared with AAD F(1,35) = 8.36, P = .007. Unawareness of memory loss should heighten clinicians' concern about everyday decision-making capacity in AD.
International journal of Alzheimer's disease. 01/2011; 2011:483897.
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ABSTRACT: Scaffolded feedback was tested against three other feedback presentation methods (standard corrective feedback, minimal feedback, and answer-until-correct multiple-choice feedback) over both short- and long-term retention intervals in order to assess which method would produce the most robust gains in error correction. Scaffolded feedback was a method designed to take advantage of the benefits of retrieval practice by providing incremental hints until the correct answer could be self-generated. In Experiments 1 and 3, on an immediate test, final memory for the correct answer was lowest for questions given minimal feedback, moderate for the answer-until-correct condition, and equally high in the scaffolded feedback condition and the standard feedback condition. However, tests of the maintenance of the corrections over a 30-min delay (Experiment 2) and over a 1-day delay (Experiment 3) demonstrated that scaffolded feedback gave rise to the best memory for the correct answers at a delay.
Memory & Cognition 10/2010; 38(7):951-61. · 1.92 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Metacognitions of agency were investigated using a computer task in which X's and O's streamed from the top of a computer screen, and the participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the X's and avoid the O's. After each 15 s trial, participants made judgments of agency and judgments of performance. Objective control was either undistorted, or distorted by (1) Turbulence (i.e., random noise), (2) a Lag between the mouse and cursor movements (of 250 or 500 ms), or (3) 'Magic,' (i.e., an increased radius around the X's for which credit was given). In Experiment 1, college students' judgments of agency showed that they were sensitive to all three manipulations. They also indicated that they felt more in control in the Lag conditions, where there was a rule on which they could potentially capitalize, than in the matched Turbulence conditions. In Experiment 2, older adults were also sensitive to all three manipulations, but less so than the college students. They were not sensitive to the difference between the Lag and Turbulence manipulations. Finally, in Experiment 3, 8-10 year-old children were sensitive to their loss of control equally in the Lag and Turbulence conditions. However, when performance was artificially improved, in the Magic condition, children took full credit and showed no evidence that they realized that the results were due to an external variable. Together, these findings suggest that people's metacognition of agency changes in important ways across the lifespan.
Cognition 08/2010; 116(2):267-82. · 3.16 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: We investigated whether the superior memory performance sometimes seen with delayed rather than immediate feedback was attributable to the shorter retention interval (or lag to test) from the last presentation of the correct information in the delayed condition. Whether lag to test was controlled or not, delayed feedback produced better final test performance than did immediate feedback, which in turn produced better performance than did no feedback at all, when we tested Grade 6 children learning school-relevant vocabulary. With college students learning GRE-level words, however, delayed feedback produced better performance than did immediate feedback (and both were better than no feedback) when lag to test was uncontrolled, but there was no difference between the delayed and immediate feedback conditions when the lag to test was controlled.
Memory & Cognition 12/2009; 37(8):1077-87. · 1.92 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Although humans generally experience a coherent sense of selfhood, we can nevertheless articulate different aspects of self. Recent research has demonstrated that one such aspect of self--conceptual knowledge of one's own personality traits--is subserved by ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC). Here, we examined whether an alternative aspect of "self"--being an agent who acts to achieve one's own goals--relies on cognitive processes that overlap with or diverge from conceptual operationalizations of selfhood. While undergoing fMRI, participants completed tasks of both conceptual self-reference, in which they judged their own or another person's personality traits, and agentic self-reference, in which they freely chose an object or watched passively as one was chosen. The agentic task failed to modulate vMPFC, despite producing the same memory enhancement frequently observed during conceptual self-referential processing (the "self-reference" effect). Instead, agentic self-reference was associated with activation of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), a region previously implicated in planning and executing actions. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that IPS activity correlated with later memory performance for the agentic, but not conceptual, task. These results support views of the "self" as a collection of distinct mental operations distributed throughout the brain, rather than a unitary cognitive system.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11/2009; 22(10):2186-97. · 5.18 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: We tested the idea that real-world situations, such as the highly strenuous exercise involved in marathon running, that impose extreme physical demands on an individual may result in neurohormonal changes that alter the functioning of memory. Marathon runners were given implicit and explicit memory tasks before or immediately after they completed a marathon. Runners tested immediately upon completing the marathon showed impairment in the explicit memory task but enhancement in the implicit memory task. This postmarathon impairment in explicit memory is similar to that seen with amnesic patients with organic brain damage. However, no previous studies have shown a simultaneous enhancement in the implicit memory task, as shown by the marathon runners in the present study. This study indicates that human memory functioning can be dynamically altered by such activities as marathon running, in which hundreds of thousands of healthy normal individuals routinely partake.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 07/2009; 16(3):475-9. · 2.61 Impact Factor
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Janet Metcalfe
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ABSTRACT: Recent evidence indicates that people's judgments of their own learning are causally related to their study behavior and not epiphenomenal. I argue here that people use these metacognitions in an effort to selectively study material in their own region of proximal learning. First they attempt to eliminate materials that are already well learned. Then they progress successively from studying easier to more difficult materials. Successful implementation of this metacognitively guided strategy enhances learning. The necessary components are, first, that the metacognitions be accurate, and second, that the appropriate choices are implemented for study. With these parts in place, the individual is in position to effectively take control of his or her own learning.
Current Directions in Psychological Science 06/2009; 18(3):159-163. · 3.93 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Two processes are postulated to underlie delayed judgments of learning (JOLs)--cue familiarity and target retrievability. The two processes are distinguishable because the familiarity-based judgments are thought to be faster than the retrieval-based processes, because only retrieval-based JOLs should enhance the relative accuracy of the correlations between the JOLs and criterion test performance, and because only retrieval-based judgments should enhance memory. To test these predictions, in three experiments, the authors either speeded people's JOLs or allowed them to be unspeeded. The relative accuracy of the JOLs in predicting performance on the criterion test was higher for the unspeeded JOLs than for the speeded JOLs, as predicted. The unspeeded JOL conditions showed enhanced memory as compared with the speeded JOL conditions, as predicted. Finally, the unspeeded JOLs were sensitive to manipulations that modified recallability of the target, whereas the speeded JOLs were selectively sensitive to experimental variations in the familiarity of the cues. Thus, all three of the predictions about the consequences of the two processes potentially underlying delayed JOLs were borne out. A model of the processes underlying delayed JOLs based on these and earlier results is presented.
Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition 10/2008; 34(5):1084-97. · 2.85 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Although methamphetamine abuse has been associated with cognitive deficits, few studies have investigated the acute effects of the drug on complex cognitive performance. This study evaluated the acute effects of intranasal methamphetamine on a computerized task measuring metacognition of agency.
Ten nontreatment seeking methamphetamine abusers (2F, 8M) completed this four-session, within-participant, double-blind laboratory study; during each session, participants received one of four doses (0, 12, 25, or 50 mg/70 kg) and completed the metacognition of agency task. In this task, participants were instructed to "catch" falling targets with a mouse and then provide metacognitive judgments about their feelings of control.
Following placebo, judgments of agency were greater under optimal task conditions compared with less than optimal task conditions. Relative to placebo, the 12-mg dose improved task performance, increased judgments of agency under the optimal condition, and decreased judgments of agency under the less than optimal condition. By contrast, the larger doses (25 and 50 mg) increased judgments of agency only under the optimal condition but disrupted performance under the less than optimal condition.
These data show that a low intranasal methamphetamine dose enhanced judgments of agency and performance, while larger doses produced limited effects.
Psychopharmacologia 04/2008; 197(1):137-44. · 4.08 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Three experiments investigated whether study choice was directly related to judgments of learning (JOLs) by examining people's choices in cases in which JOLs were dissociated from recall. In Experiment 1, items were given either three repetitions or one repetition on Trial 1. Items given three repetitions received one on Trial 2, and those given one repetition received three on Trial 2-equating performance at the end of Trial 2, but yielding different immediate Trial 2 JOLs. Study choice followed the "illusory" JOLs. A delayed JOL condition in Experiment 2 did not show this JOL bias and neither did study choice. Finally, using a paradigm (Koriat & Bjork, 2005) in which similar JOLs are given to forward and backward associative pairs, despite much worse performance on the backward pairs, study choice again followed the mistaken JOLs. We concluded that JOLs-what people believe they know-directly influence people's study choices.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 02/2008; 15(1):174-9. · 2.61 Impact Factor
