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Hindsight Bias Across the Life Span
Abstract
The authors review the current state of developmental research on hindsight bias. In research on cognitive development in children as well as in cognitive-aging research, studies on hindsight bias are rare. The few existing studies indicate that children and older adults show stronger hindsight bias than young adults. The authors show commonalities and differences in hindsight bias studies in the child development and aging literatures, and suggest venues for future research toward a life span perspective on the development of hindsight bias. Special emphasis is given to the potential of theories developed for other retroactive-interference paradigms to help explain age differences in hindsight bias. Methodological challenges in investigating the development of hindsight bias are also discussed.
... Later studies also differentiated between two main ways to examine hindsight bias (Pohl, 2007). The design used by Fischhoff (1975) is termed the hypothetical design, as participants in the hindsight condition receive feedback about the actual outcome (or, the correct answer), but ...
... replicate further studies about hindsight bias which had a stronger focus on the underlying psychological processes, and 2) extend our findings in Study 3 using other designs, such as memory recall (Pohl, 2007), and multinomial processing trees (Bernstein et al., 2011;Groß & Bayen, 2015;Hell, Gigerenzer, Gauggel, Mall, & Müller, 1988). ...
... Past findings about age differences of hindsight bias are inconclusive. Some research suggests that hindsight bias is stronger among children and older adults than among younger adults, because children and older adults are more susceptible to accessibility bias (i.e., encoding irrelevant information presented after the original information) and/or inhibitory deficit (i.e., incapability to suppress the retrieval of interfering information presented after the original information) (Bayen et al., 2007;Bernstein et al., 2011). ...
Hindsight bias refers to the tendency to perceive an event outcome as more probable after being informed of that outcome. We conducted very close replications of two classic experiments of hindsight bias and a conceptual replication testing hindsight bias regarding the perceived replicability of hindsight bias. In Study 1 (N = 890), we replicated Experiment 2 in Fischhoff (1975), and found support for hindsight bias in retrospective judgments (dmean = 0.60). In Study 2 (N = 608), we replicated Experiment 1 in Slovic and Fischhoff (1977), and found support for hindsight bias in prospective judgments (dmean = 0.40). In Study 3 (N = 520) we found strong support for hindsight bias regarding perceived likelihood of our replication of hindsight bias (d = 0.43–1.03). We also included extensions examining surprise, confidence, and task difficulty, yet found mixed evidence with weak to no effects. We concluded support for hindsight bias in both retrospective and prospective judgments, and in evaluations of replication findings, and therefore call for establishing measures to address hindsight bias in valuations of replication work and interpreting research outcomes. All materials, data, and code, were shared on: https://osf.io/nrwpv/.
... Later studies also differentiated between two main ways to examine hindsight bias (Pohl, 2007). The design used by Fischhoff (1975) is termed the hypothetical design, as participants in the hindsight condition receive feedback about the actual outcome (or, the correct answer), but ...
... replicate further studies about hindsight bias which had a stronger focus on the underlying psychological processes, and 2) extend our findings in Study 3 using other designs, such as memory recall (Pohl, 2007), and multinomial processing trees (Bernstein et al., 2011;Groß & Bayen, 2015;Hell, Gigerenzer, Gauggel, Mall, & Müller, 1988). ...
... Past findings about age differences of hindsight bias are inconclusive. Some research suggests that hindsight bias is stronger among children and older adults than among younger adults, because children and older adults are more susceptible to accessibility bias (i.e., encoding irrelevant information presented after the original information) and/or inhibitory deficit (i.e., incapability to suppress the retrieval of interfering information presented after the original information) (Bayen et al., 2007;Bernstein et al., 2011). ...
Hindsight bias refers to the tendency to perceive an event outcome as more probable after being informed of that outcome. We conducted very close replications of two classic experiments testing the hindsight bias and conceptual replication to test hindsight bias regarding the replicability of hindsight bias. In Study 1 (N = 890), we replicated Experiment 2 in Fischhoff (1975), and found support for hindsight bias in retrospective judgments (dmean = 0.60). In Study 2 (N = 608), we replicated Experiment 1 in Slovic and Fischhoff (1977), and found support for hindsight bias in prospective judgments (dmean = 0.40). In Study 3 (N = 520) we found strong support for hindsight bias regarding perceived likelihood of our replication of hindsight bias (d = 0.43 ~ 1.03). We also included extensions examining surprise, confidence, and task difficulty, yet found mixed evidence with weak to no effects. We concluded support for hindsight bias in both retrospective and prospective judgments, and in evaluations of replication findings, and therefore call for establishing measures to address hindsight bias in valuations of replication work and interpreting research outcomes.
... In developmental studies, greater hindsight bias has been found in children as well as older adults compared with young adults, but only one study has tested hindsight bias across the whole life span (Bernstein, Erdfelder, Meltzoff, Peria, & Loftus, 2011). Some researchers have suggested that lack of inhibitory control, which shows a similar life-span pattern (Bedard et al., 2002;Cepeda, Kramer, & Gonzalez De Sather, 2001), may be responsible for these age differences in hindsight bias (Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Pohl, Bayen, & Martin, 2010). We scrutinized this account by looking at the distinct cognitive mechanisms underlying hindsight bias (following the suggestion by Erdfelder & Buchner, 1998). ...
... The commonality between these and other phenomena (for a comprehensive collection, see Pohl, 2017) seems to be that new information conflicts with older information and that it is necessary to ignore the new information for an unbiased judgment or retrieval of the old information. This view has also been endorsed by researchers who consider lack of inhibitory control responsible for hindsight bias (e.g., Bayen et al., 2007;Pohl et al., 2010). The rationale behind this idea is that the CJ is a taskirrelevant distractor that needs to be inhibited such that it does not influence information processing. ...
... We also tested whether this account extended to the specific cognitive mechanisms assumed to lead to hindsight bias. Researchers have mainly focused on three such mechanisms, namely recollection bias, reconstruction bias, and CJ adoption (see Bayen et al., 2007;Erdfelder & Buchner, 1998;Pohl et al., 2010;Stahlberg & Maass, 1998). Recollection bias occurs when knowledge of the CJ impairs recollection of the OJ, a process leading to lower probability of correctly recalling one's OJ for experimental items compared with control items (see Erdfelder, Brandt, & Bröder, 2007). ...
Hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate one’s prior knowledge of a fact or event after learning the actual fact. Recent research suggests that age-related differences in hindsight bias may be based on age-related differences in inhibitory control. We tested whether this explanation holds for three cognitive processes assumed to underlie hindsight bias: recollection bias, reconstruction bias, and the tendency to adopt newly acquired knowledge as old. We performed a typical hindsight-bias study including 9-year-olds, 12-year-olds, young adults, and older adults. Participants first gave numerical judgments to difficult almanac questions. They later received the correct judgments for some of the questions while trying to recall their own earlier judgments. In order to experimentally test the impact of inhibitory control, the correct judgment was presented either in a weak or in a strong, difficult-to-ignore manner. Hindsight bias was larger in the strong than in the weak condition and followed a ∪-shaped lifespan pattern with young adults showing the least hindsight bias, in line with an inhibitory-control explanation. Yet, the mixture of underlying processes differed considerably between age groups, so that inhibitory control does not suffice as a sole explanation of age differences.
... One explanation for increased HB in older adults is that declines in episodic memory and executive functioning may influence susceptibility to outcome knowledge when making hindsight judgments (e.g., Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Coolin et al., 2014). Indeed, we previously found that older adults' susceptibility to HB was partly due to age-related declines in episodic memory and inhibition (Coolin et al., 2014). ...
... The role of cognitive functioning in HB Cognitive abilities that have been implicated in age differences in HB include inhibition of irrelevant information, episodic memory, and working memory (e.g., Bayen et al., 2006;Bayen et al., 2007;Coolin et al., 2014;Groß & Bayen, in press). We have previously reported that inhibition and episodic memory partially mediated age-related increases in HB in a sample of older and younger adults (Coolin et al., 2014). ...
... Each inhibitory function is less efficient in older than in younger adults, and poorer inhibitory functioning is associated with difficulty in other areas of cognitive functioning (e.g., episodic memory, processing speed, attention; Lustig et al., 2007). Researchers have suggested that several inhibitory functions may be involved in the memory judgment HB task (see Bayen et al., 2006;Bayen et al., 2007). For example, access inhibition may be required to control access of irrelevant CJ information from entering working memory and interfering with recall of taskrelevant OJ information. ...
After learning an event's outcome, people's recollection of their former prediction of that event typically shifts toward the actual outcome. Erdfelder and Buchner (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 387-414, 1998) developed a multinomial processing tree (MPT) model to identify the underlying processes contributing to this hindsight bias (HB) phenomenon. More recent applications of this model have revealed that, in comparison to younger adults, older adults are more susceptible to two underlying HB processes: recollection bias and reconstruction bias. However, the impact of cognitive functioning on these processes remains unclear. In this article, we extend the MPT model for HB by incorporating individual variation in cognitive functioning into the estimation of the model's core parameters in older and younger adults. In older adults, our findings revealed that (1) better episodic memory was associated with higher recollection ability in the absence of outcome knowledge, (2) better episodic memory and inhibitory control and higher working memory capacity were associated with higher recollection ability in the presence of outcome knowledge, and (3) better inhibitory control was associated with less reconstruction bias. Although the pattern of effects was similar in younger adults, the cognitive covariates did not significantly predict the underlying HB processes in this age group. In sum, we present a novel approach to modeling individual variability in MPT models. We applied this approach to the HB paradigm to identify the cognitive mechanisms contributing to the underlying HB processes. Our results show that working memory capacity and inhibitory control, respectively, drive individual differences in recollection bias and reconstruction bias, particularly in older adults.
... Although hindsight bias has been shown to be a robust phenomenon, its magnitude seems to differ depending on the age of the participants (for a review of hindsight bias across the lifespan, see Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007). Research on developmental characteristics of hindsight bias is scarce, especially when it comes to aging. ...
... The hindsight-bias memory paradigm is a retroactive-interference paradigm (Bayen et al., 2007;Erdfelder et al., 2007) in which new information (the correct judgment, CJ) interferes with the retrieval of old information (the original judgment, OJ). The CJ is task-irrelevant and is therefore a type of distraction. ...
... Effective control of distracting information can minimize retroactive interference (e.g., MacLeod, 2007). That is, inhibitory processes may play a role in the age differences observed in hindsight bias (e.g., Bayen et al., 2007). ...
Hindsight bias is the overestimation of one's earlier knowledge about facts or one's prediction of events after learning about the actual facts or events. The authors examined age differences in hindsight bias and their relation to visual access control. Younger and older adults recalled their numerical answers to general-knowledge questions. For half of the items, the correct judgment (CJ) was shown during recall. To indicate whether the distracting CJ was visually accessed, the authors measured fixations to the CJ. An instructional manipulation to ignore the CJ affected fixations and hindsight bias. Older adults showed stronger hindsight bias and more fixations to the task-irrelevant CJ, indicating an age-related deficit in access control. However, evidence for the effect of CJ access on hindsight bias was weak and more pronounced in younger than in older adults.
... Despite this wealth of empirical research and the interesting theoretical issues related to this phenomenon, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the developmental trajectory of hindsight bias. Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, and Auer (2007) summarized the developmental literature on hindsight bias and suggested that hindsight bias follows a U-shaped function across the life span, with larger hindsight bias being observed both in children and in older adults than in young adults. ...
... Researchers need such measures, however, to understand how potential developmental differences in hindsight bias come about (cf. Bayen et al., 2007). We therefore applied the memory design to investigate hindsight bias in children and adults and analyzed our data with Erdfelder and Buchner's (1998) multinomial model in order to arrive at more thorough theoretical conclusions. ...
... So far, several such mechanisms have been proposed in related research domains of thinking and memory, such as deficits in inhibitory control, heightened susceptibility to interference, slowed cognitive processing, or limited working-memory capacity (cf. Bayen et al., 2007). One of these, inhibitory control, has recently been studied in the context of hindsight bias. ...
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.
... The results from these four experiments suggest which mechanisms underlie impairments to resolution with increased exposures to the trivia questions, which is still debated. Inhibition (or anchoring-and-adjustment) explanations suggest that people have difficulty fully suppressing or inhibiting their own knowledge when estimating a novice's perspective (Bayen et al., 2007;Epley & Gilovich, 2001;Groß & Bayen, 2015;Horton & Keysar, 1996;Keysar, et al., 2000;Nickerson, 2001). In anchoring-and-adjustment models of perspective taking, people initially anchor in their own perspective and subsequently adjust away from it. ...
... Anchoring is egocentric and automatic, but adjustment requires effortful inhibition and time-consuming perspective monitoring (Horton & Keysar, 1996;Keysar et al., 2000;Keysar et al., 2003). Anchoring-and-adjustment theories of perspective taking suggest that biases in estimates of others' mental states primarily arise because people have difficulty inhibiting their own knowledge and fail to adequately adjust away from their own perspectives (Bayen et al., 2007;Lagattuta et al., 2010;Lagattuta et al., 2014). Research across many communication tasks is largely consistent with this model (e.g., Brown-Schmidt, 2009;Keysar et al., 2000;Lin et al., 2010;Ryskin et al., 2015). ...
To succeed in a social world, we must be able to accurately estimate what others know. For example, teachers must anticipate student knowledge to plan lessons and communicate effectively. Yet one’s own knowledge consistently contaminates estimates about others’ knowledge. We examine how one’s knowledge influences the calibration and resolution of participants’ estimates of novices’ knowledge. Across four experiments, participants studied trivia questions and estimated the percentage of novice participants who would know the answer across multiple study/estimation rounds. When participants were required to answer the question before estimating what novices would know, studying the facts impaired both the calibration and resolution of the estimates. Studying the facts reduced the validity of one’s experiences for predicting novices’ knowledge, and estimators utilized their own experiences less when predicting novices’ knowledge as they studied. Experimentally reducing reliance on one’s own knowledge did not improve the accuracy of estimates. The results suggest that learning impairs the accuracy of judgments of others’ knowledge, not because estimators rely too heavily on their own experiences, but because estimators lack diagnostic cues about others’ knowledge.
... One proposed mechanism underlying the curse of knowledge bias is Inhibitory Control (IC). Explanations that involve inhibition argue that people have difficulty fully discounting or inhibiting their own knowledge (see Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Grob & Bayen, 2015b;Pohl et al., 2003;Lagattuta, Sayfan, & Blattman, 2010;Lagattuta, Sayfan, & Harvey, 2014). For example, when people are asked trivia questions such as ''Where is the Trevi Fountain?" and are asked to estimate the percentage of peers who know the answer to this question, those who know the answer (i.e., Rome, Italy) overestimate the percentage of their peers who will know the answer compared to participants who do not know the answer. ...
... Finally, we favor the term 'curse of knowledge' over 'reality bias' because the former captures the fact that it is one's knowledge or beliefs about reality (and not necessarily reality per se) that leads to the bias-that is, one can be biased by what one thinks they know about reality (such as whether a statement was intended to be sarcastic or not) even if what one thinks is incorrect. Coolin, Erdfelder, Bernstein, Thornton, and Thornton (2014) and Groß and Bayen (2015b) found evidence in support of an inhibition explanation; however, age differences in inhibitory function could not fully account for the age differences these researchers observed in the bias, suggesting that more than one mechanism is likely involved (see Bayen et al., 2007 for a review of the strengths and weaknesses of inhibition accounts). ...
Knowledge can be a curse: Once we have acquired a particular item of knowledge it tends to bias, or contaminate, our ability to reason about a less informed perspective (referred to as the ‘curse of knowledge’ or ‘hindsight bias’). The mechanisms underlying the curse of knowledge bias are a matter of great import and debate. We highlight two mechanisms that have been proposed to underlie this bias—inhibition and fluency misattribution. Explanations that involve inhibition argue that people have difficulty fully inhibiting or suppressing the content of their knowledge when trying to reason about a less informed perspective. Explanations that involve fluency misattribution focus on the feelings of fluency with which the information comes to mind and the tendency to misattribute the subjective feelings of fluency associated with familiar items to the objective ease or foreseeability of that information. Three experiments with a total of 359 undergraduate students provide the first evidence that fluency misattribution processes are sufficient to induce the curse of knowledge bias. These results add to the literature on the many manifestations of the curse of knowledge bias and the many types of source misattributions, by revealing their role in people’s judgements of how common, or widespread, one’s knowledge is. The implications of these results for cognitive science and social cognition are discussed.
... From the few extant studies, there is mixed evidence for developmental changes in hindsight bias in the preschool years. There is some evidence for a developmental decline in hindsight bias from childhood to adulthood (Pohl, Bayen, & Martin, 2010), but evidence here too is mixed (see Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Birch & Bernstein, 2007, for reviews). The evidence for hindsight bias in older adults is also sparse. ...
... Apparently, the mechanism of itemspecific retroactive inhibition, assumed to underlie recollection biases in within-subjects hindsight bias designs , shows no clear developmental trend across the life span. Hence, this mechanism cannot be equated simply with susceptibility to retroactive interference or lack of inhibition, both of which have been argued to follow U-shaped curves across the life span (Bayen et al., 2007;Hasher & Zacks, 1988). ...
... One possible explanation is that older adults' deficits in inhibitory control (e.g., Hasher & Zacks, 1988;Lustig, Hasher, & Zacks, 2007) may increase the biasing effect of the CJ on OJ recollection and/or on OJ reconstruction (cf. Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007). Both Coolin, Erdfelder, Bernstein, Thornton, & Thornton (2014) and Groß and Bayen (2015) found evidence in support of this explanation; however, age differences in inhibitory function could not fully account for age differences in hindsight bias. ...
... Young adults with a long RI and thus low OJ recall may have had a higher susceptibility to the CJs biasing influence compared to the older adults; however, their better ability to inhibit the CJs during ROJ may have prevented their recollection bias or reconstruction bias to be more probable than that of the older adults (cf. Bayen et al., 2007;Coolin, Erdfelder et al., 2014;Groß & Bayen, 2014). ...
Hindsight bias, that is, the overestimation of one's prior knowledge of outcomes after the actual outcomes are known, is stronger in older than young adults (e.g., Bayen, Erdfelder, Bearden, & Lozito, 2006). The authors investigated whether age differences in the recall of original judgments account for this difference. Multinomial model-based analyses of data from a hindsight memory task revealed that biased reconstruction of original judgments was equally likely in both age groups when recall of original judgments was lowered in young adults via a manipulation of retention interval. These results support a recall-based explanation of age differences in hindsight bias. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
... From the few extant studies, there is mixed evidence for developmental changes in hindsight bias in the preschool years. There is some evidence for a developmental decline in hindsight bias from childhood to adulthood (Pohl, Bayen, & Martin, 2010), but evidence here too is mixed (see Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Birch & Bernstein, 2007, for reviews). The evidence for hindsight bias in older adults is also sparse. ...
... Apparently, the mechanism of itemspecific retroactive inhibition, assumed to underlie recollection biases in within-subjects hindsight bias designs , shows no clear developmental trend across the life span. Hence, this mechanism cannot be equated simply with susceptibility to retroactive interference or lack of inhibition, both of which have been argued to follow U-shaped curves across the life span (Bayen et al., 2007;Hasher & Zacks, 1988). ...
Reports an error in "Hindsight bias from 3 to 95 years of age" by Daniel M. Bernstein, Edgar Erdfelder, Andrew N. Meltzoff, William Peria and Geoffrey R. Loftus (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2011[Mar], Vol 37[2], 378-391). On page 381, the notation in Figure 1 is incorrect. The corrected notations are discussed in the correction. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2011-02006-001.) Upon learning the outcome to a problem, people tend to believe that they knew it all along (hindsight bias). Here, we report the first study to trace the development of hindsight bias across the life span. One hundred ninety-four participants aged 3 to 95 years completed 3 tasks designed to measure visual and verbal hindsight bias. All age groups demonstrated hindsight bias on all 3 tasks; however, preschoolers and older adults exhibited more bias than older children and younger adults. Multinomial processing tree analyses of these data revealed that preschoolers' enhanced hindsight bias resulted from them substituting the correct answer for their original answer in their recall (a qualitative error). Conversely, older adults' enhanced hindsight bias resulted from them forgetting their original answer and recalling an answer closer to, but not equal to, the correct answer (a quantitative error). We discuss these findings in relation to mechanisms of memory, perspective taking, theory of mind, and executive function. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... Many past studies have shown that we are less able to assume a naïve perspective after being informed (Birch, 2005;Birch & Bloom, 2007;Fischhoff, 1975;Hawkins & Hastie, 1990). The information content of the target knowledge, which we fail to inhibit when assessing other perspectives, is thought to play a central role in the bias (Bayen et al., 2007;Hoffrage & Pohl, 2003;Pohl et al., 2003). In the present study, we found that in the absence of the target knowledge, short paragraphs containing irrelevant but topic-related information not only increased participants' estimates of peer knowledge about the topic, but also promoted their own confidence in the knowledge. ...
This study shows that exposure to topic-related but irrelevant information enhances both estimates of peer knowledge and our own sense of knowledge. In Experiment 1, participants were more confident in their answers to general knowledge questions and gave higher estimates of peer knowledge when such questions were accompanied by short paragraphs containing topic-related yet nondiagnostic information than when they were not. The inflated peer knowledge estimates were independent of the classic curse of knowledge. Experiments 2, 3, 5, and 6 demonstrated that irrelevant information biases knowledge estimation via its semantic relatedness to the test questions; response latencies were measured in Experiments 5 and 6 to examine the possible role of retrieval fluency in the semantic relatedness effect. Experiment 4 attributed the bias to information content (e.g., “it is generally known that keratin is responsible”), not comments on knowledge popularity (e.g., “what is responsible is generally known”). Importantly, the effect of irrelevant information on estimates of peer knowledge was fully mediated by confidence in own knowledge in Experiments 1, 2, 4, and 5. Experiment 6 manipulated retrieval fluency and failed to find conclusive evidence for its involvement in the semantic relatedness effect. We conclude that irrelevant information boosts peer knowledge estimation through its semantic relatedness to the problem at hand, and the effect is mostly explained by a corresponding increase in the individual’s own sense of knowledge.
... Lastly, not all participants included in this study were actively exiting from the JW religion. Thus, this report contains some retrospective accounts that may not be as accurate as descriptions of current experiences (Bayen et al., 2007). ...
Shunning and ostracism have severe impacts on individuals’ psychological and social well-being. Members of Jehovah’s Witnesses are subject to shunning when they do not comply with the stated doctrine or belief system. To investigate the effects of shunning, interviews with 10 former Jehovah’s Witnesses, ranging in age from 20 to 44 years old, were conducted; six male, six White, one Native American, one Black, and two Latinx. Transcripts were analyzed with interpretative phenomenological analysis for narrative themes pertaining to their life after exclusion from their former faith using the context of Jehovah’s Witnesses culture. Results suggest shunning has a long-term, detrimental effect on mental health, job possibilities, and life satisfaction. Problems are amplified in female former members due to heavy themes of sexism and patriarchal narratives pervasive in Jehovah’s Witnesses culture. Feelings of loneliness, loss of control, and worthlessness are also common after leaving. The culture of informing on other members inside the Jehovah’s Witnesses also leads to a continued sense of distrust and suspicion long after leaving.
... Children and adults showed robust hindsight bias by using their advance knowledge to overestimate their peers' ability to identify the objects (Bernstein et al., 2004). Other cross-sectional and cross-experimental work using the visual hindsight task and other tasks reveals that hindsight bias follows a U-shaped pattern from preschool to old age such that preschoolers and older adults show more hindsight bias than do older children and younger adults (Bayen et al., 2007;Bernstein, Erdfelder, et al., 2011). ...
Participants ranging in age from 3 to 98 years (N = 708; approximately 60% female; 49% Caucasian, 38% Asian; 12% Other ethnicities, 1% Indigenous; modal household income > $80,000) completed a battery of tasks involving verbal ability, executive function, and perspective-taking. Wherever possible, all participants completed the same version of a task. The current study tested hindsight bias and false-belief reasoning to determine how these constructs relate to each other across the child-to-adult life span. Participants of all ages showed robust hindsight bias and false-belief reasoning errors. Hindsight bias followed a U-shaped function, wherein preschoolers and older adults showed more hindsight bias than older children and younger adults. False-belief reasoning, conversely, was relatively constant from preschool to older adulthood. Hindsight bias did not correlate with false-belief reasoning. We conclude that hindsight bias and false-belief reasoning errors are robust but unrelated cognitive biases across the life span.
... The hindsight bias was demonstrated in a variety of domains, including medical diagnoses (Arkes et al., 1988), legal decisions (Giroux et al., 2016), political elections (Blank et al., 2003), financial investments (Biais & Weber, 2009), and sport events (Roese & Maniar, 2016). The hindsight bias exists across cultures (Pohl et al., 2002), across the lifespan (Bayen et al., 2007;Bernstein et al., 2011), and it is evident in visual (Harley et al., 2004), auditory (Bernstein et al., 2012), and gustatory judgments (Pohl et al., 2003b). Thus, the hindsight bias is a very robust cognitive illusion (Christensen-Szalanski & Willham, 1991;Guilbault et al., 2004;Hoffrage & Pohl, 2003). ...
Hindsight bias describes people's tendency to overestimate how accurately they have predicted an event's outcome after obtaining knowledge about it. Outcome knowledge has been shown to influence various forms of judgments, but it is unclear whether outcome knowledge also produces a hindsight bias on Judgments of Learning (JOLs). Three experiments tested whether people overestimated the accuracy of their memory predictions after obtaining knowledge about their actual memory performance. In all experiments, participants studied 60 cue-target word pairs, made a JOL for each word pair, and tried to recall the targets in a cued-recall test. In Experiments 1a and 1b, people recollected their original JOLs after attempting to recall each target, that is, after they obtained outcome knowledge for all items. In Experiments 2 and 3, people recollected their original JOLs in a separate phase after attempting to recall half the targets so that they had outcome knowledge for some but not all items. In all experiments, recollected JOLs were closer to actual memory performance than original JOLs for items with outcome knowledge only. Thus, outcome knowledge produced a hindsight bias on JOLs. Our results demonstrate that people overestimate the accuracy of their memory predictions in hindsight.
... Debiasing strategies Wexler and Schopp (1989) review of mental health malpractice litigation contexts Christensen-Szalanski and Willham (1991) meta-analysis of 122 hindsight studies and their contexts Guilbault et al. (2004) meta-analysis of a total of 95 studies (12 unpublished) Larrick (2004) review of hindsight bias and its debiasing tactics Roese (2004) review of benefits and mechanisms of counterfactuals Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, and Auer (2007) review on developmental research on hindsight bias Fischhoff (2007) review of various cognitive biases Harley (2007) review of cases in legal decision making Roese and Vohs (2012) review of theories and debiasing techniques Kenyon and Beaulac (2014) thoughts on teaching debiasing strategies Giroux, Coburn, Harley, Connolly, and Bernstein (2016) review of hindsight bias and the law Groβ and Pachur (2019) meta-analysis on hindsight bias in young and older adults ...
Hindsight bias is a phenomenon that occurs when outcome knowledge interferes with the ability to accurately recall judgments made in a previous, naïve state. Also known as the “knew it all along” bias, we aimed to diminish the bias by having individuals take the perspective of a naïve other, as a way of encouraging acceptance that they had, in fact, not known it all along. Adult participants were given blurry-to-clear images incrementally until they were able to identify the object and were then re-presented with the same sequence of images and asked to make a judgment about when they had identified the item correctly the first time. They were also asked to judge when they thought a naïve peer (Experiments 1 and 2), or a naïve child (Experiment 2) could identify the objects. Results showed a robust hindsight bias in all perspectives, and sporadic success at eliminating the bias. When taking the perspective of a naïve peer, there were failures and successes; when taking the perspective of a naïve child, there was an ultra-debiasing, or a reverse hindsight bias. However, did the manipulation backfire? We conclude that while the manipulation of thinking like a naïve child may have eliminated the bias, participants seemed to use an “adults know best” rule rather than accepting past naivete for themselves.
... Various studies have proposed that perceivers' egocentric reasoning might be caused by their inability to suppress salient (e.g., Bayen et al., 2007;Lagattuta et al., 2010), highly accessible knowledge (e.g., Harley et al., 2004;see Birch et al., 2017, for a review). Building on these mechanisms, several studies proposed factors that might decrease egocentric projection. ...
People are likely to use their own knowledge as a frame of reference when they try to assess another person’s perspective. Due to this egocentric anchoring, people often overestimate the extent to which others share their point of view. This study investigated which type of feedback (if any) stimulates perceivers to make estimations of another person’s perspective that are less biased by egocentric knowledge. We allocated participants to one of three feedback conditions (no feedback, accuracy feedback, narrative feedback). Findings showed that participants who were given feedback adjusted their perspective-judgment more than those who did not receive feedback. They also showed less egocentric projection on future assessments. Participants adjusted their perspective within the same trial to the same degree for both feedback types. However, participants’ egocentric bias was only reduced when they received narrative feedback and not when they received accuracy feedback about their performance. Implications of these findings for theories of perspective-taking are discussed.
... According to an inhibitory control account, the curse of knowledge can be overcome by suppressing, or inhibiting, one's privileged knowledge when reasoning about a na€ ıve perspective (e.g., Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007). For example, if you know the location of the Trevi Fountain, you must inhibit that information (Rome, Italy) to make accurate inferences about others' knowledge. ...
The ability to make inferences about what one’s peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one’s knowledge when reasoning about others’ knowledge, in children’s estimates of their peers’ knowledge. Four‐ to 7‐year‐olds were taught the answers to factual questions and estimated how many peers would know the answers. When children learned familiar answers, they showed a curse of knowledge in their peer estimates. But, when children learned unfamiliar answers to the same questions, they did not show a curse of knowledge. These data shed light on the mechanisms underlying perspective taking, supporting a fluency misattribution account of the curse of knowledge.
... Several cross-sectional studies compared younger and older children (e.g., Pohl, Bayen, & Martin, 2010) and younger and older adults (e.g., Bayen, Erdfelder, Bearden, & Lozito, 2006), and one study even compared participants from 3 to 95 years of age (Bernstein et al., 2011). A common finding of these studies is that, across the lifespan, hindsight bias follows a U-shaped function, with younger children and older adults exhibiting the largest hindsight bias (Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007). Some studies (e.g., Coolin, Bernstein, Thornton, & Thornton, 2014;Groß & Bayen, 2015) tried to explain these differences with corresponding differences in episodic memory and inhibitory capacities, which are both known to follow inverted U-shaped functions across the lifespan. ...
... In light of our results, what are the candidate causes of age differences in hindsight bias? Our finding of a higher probability of reconstruction bias in older adults supports suggestions that older adults' inhibitory deficit might play an important role (Bayen et al., 2006;Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Coolin et al., 2016;Pohl et al., 2018; see also Lustig, Hasher, & Zacks, 2007). Specifically, it is conceivable that lower inhibitory abilities tempt older adults to rely more on the correct answer when they reconstruct their original judgment, leading to a larger probability of reconstruction bias. ...
After people have learned a fact or the outcome of an event, they often overestimate their ability to have known the correct answer beforehand. This hindsight bias has two sources: an impairment in direct recall of the original (i.e., uninformed) judgment after presentation of the correct answer (recollection bias) and a reconstruction of the original judgment that is biased towards the correct answer (reconstruction bias). Research on how cognitive aging affects the sources of hindsight bias has produced mixed results. To synthesize the available findings, we conducted a meta-analysis of nine studies (N = 366 young, N = 368 older adults). We isolated the probabilities of recollection, recollection bias, and reconstruction bias with a Bayesian, three-level hierarchical implementation of the multinomial processing tree model of hindsight bias (Erdfelder & Buchner, 1998). Additionally, we quantified the magnitude of bias in the reconstructed judgment. Overall, older adults were less likely to recollect their original judgment than young adults, and thus had to reconstruct it more frequently. Importantly, outcome knowledge impaired recollection of the original judgment (i.e., recollection bias) to a similar extent in both age groups, but outcome knowledge was more likely to distort reconstruction of the original judgment (i.e., reconstruction bias) in older adults. In addition, the magnitude of bias in the reconstructed judgments was slightly larger in older than in young adults. Our results provide the basis for a targeted investigation of the mechanisms driving these age differences.
... To date, the specific cognitive processes that influence this bias are still a matter of great debate in the adult literature. According to an inhibitory control account, the bias can be partially overcome by inhibiting the contents of one's knowledge (Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Groß & Bayen, 2015). According to this account, if you know that Trump won the election and you want to recall what you thought before the election (e.g., how probable you thought it was that Trump would win) you must attempt to inhibit your newfound knowledge of the outcome. ...
Perspective taking, or “theory of mind,” involves reasoning about the mental states of others (e.g., their intentions, desires, knowledge, beliefs) and is called upon in virtually every aspect of human interaction. Our goals in writing this chapter were to provide an overview of (a) the research questions developmental psychologists ask to shed light on how children think about the inner workings of the mind, and (b) why such research is invaluable in understanding human nature and our ability to interact with, and learn from, one another. We begin with a brief review of early research in this field that culminated in the so-called litmus test for a theory of mind (i.e., false-belief tasks). Next, we describe research with infants and young children that created a puzzle for many researchers, and briefly mention an intriguing approach researchers have used to attempt to “solve” this puzzle. We then turn to research examining children's understanding of a much broader range of mental states (beyond false beliefs). We briefly discuss the value of studying individual differences by highlighting their important implications for social well-being and ways to improve perspective taking. Next, we review work illustrating the value of capitalizing on children's proclivity for selective social learning to reveal their understanding of others’ mental states. We close by highlighting one line of research that we believe will be an especially fruitful avenue for future research and serves to emphasize the complex interplay between our perspective-taking abilities and other cognitive processes.
... Given a failure in access control, the suppression and restraint functions of inhibition may be involved in withholding the prepotent reading response. Of these functions, the suppression function appears most relevant to the HB paradigm because it enables the deletion of irrelevant information (i.e., CJs) from working memory, increasing access to information that is relevant to the task at hand (i.e., OJs; see Bayen et al., 2006Bayen et al., , 2007). Thus, an inhibitory control measure that more strongly taps the suppression function might produce even stronger effects than those reported in the present study. ...
Outcome knowledge influences recall of earlier predictions of the event in question. Researchers have hypothesized that age-related declines in inhibitory control may underlie older adults’ increased susceptibility to the two underlying bias processes that contribute to this hindsight bias (HB) phenomenon, recollection bias and reconstruction bias. Indeed, Coolin et al. (2015) found that older adults with lower inhibitory control were less likely to recall their earlier predictions in the presence of outcome knowledge (lower recollection ability) and were more likely to be biased by outcome knowledge when reconstructing their forgotten predictions (higher reconstruction bias) than those with higher inhibitory control. In the present study, we assess intraindividual differences in older adults’ recollection and reconstruction processes using a within-subjects manipulation of inhibition. We tested 80 older adults (Mage = 71.40, range = 65 to 87) to assess whether (a) experimentally increasing inhibition burden via outcome rehearsal during the HB task impacts the underlying HB processes, and (b) the effects of this outcome rehearsal manipulation on the underlying HB processes vary with individual differences in cognitive abilities. Our findings revealed that outcome rehearsal increased recollection bias independently of individuals’ cognitive abilities. Conversely, outcome rehearsal only increased reconstruction bias in individuals with higher inhibitory control, resulting in these individuals performing similarly to individuals with lower inhibitory control. These observations support the role of inhibitory control in older adults’ HB and suggest that even individuals with higher inhibition ability are susceptible to HB when processing resources are limited.
... We predict that the curse of knowledge is not a result of a singular cognitive mechanism such as inhibitory control but more likely the result of two or more cognitive mechanisms and biases working in tandem (e.g., inhibitory control, working memory, and fluency misattribution) that may contribute differential effects depending on the age of the participant (e.g., see Birch and Bernstein, 2007;Groß and Bayen, 2015a,b, for discussion). The curse of knowledge has been studied extensively in young adults, with limited research in children and older adults (see Bayen et al., 2007;Coolin et al., 2015). ToM, conversely, has been studied extensively in young children but less in adults (see Birch and Bloom, 2007;Samson and Apperly, 2010;Miller, 2012;Surtees and Apperly, 2012). ...
Virtually every social interaction involves reasoning about the perspectives of others, or ‘theory of mind (ToM).’ Previous research suggests that it is difficult to ignore our current knowledge when reasoning about a more naïve perspective (i.e., the curse of knowledge). In this Mini Review, we discuss the implications of the curse of knowledge for certain aspects of ToM. Particularly, we examine how the curse of knowledge influences key measurements of false belief reasoning. In closing, we touch on the need to develop new measurement tools to discern the mechanisms involved in the curse of knowledge and false belief reasoning, and how they develop across the lifespan.
... Cognitive psychology researchers describe hindsight bias as a 'robust' phenomenon -that is, observable under a wide variety of experimental conditions [12,[21][22][23]. It has been measured and demonstrated across age groups [21,24], and in different cultures [25,26]. It has been investigated in a variety of domains, including legal decision-making [27], medical diagnosis and malpractice claims [28][29][30], forecasting in finance [31], elections [32], consumer satisfaction studies [33], and accident investigations [34]. ...
Simulation-based education (SBE) has the potential to misrepresent clinical practice as relatively simplistic, and as being made safer through simplistic behavioural explanations. This review provides an overview of a well-documented and robust psychological construct - hindsight bias in the context of learning in healthcare simulations. Motivating this review are our observations that post-simulation debriefings may be oversimplified and biased by knowledge of scenario outcomes. Sometimes only limited consideration is given to issues that might be relevant to management in the complexity and uncertainty of real clinical practice. We use literature on hindsight bias to define the concept, inputs and implications. We offer examples from SBE where hindsight bias may occur and propose suggestions for mitigation. Influences of hindsight biases on SBE should be addressed by future studies.
... Less effective recollection contributes to strengthening older adults' hindsight bias in some circumstances (Bayen, Erdfelder, Bearden, & Lozito, 2006;Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Bernstein, Erdfelder, Meltzoff, Peria, & Loftus, 2011). 4 Similarly, less effective encoding and recollection processes, together with emotion-related factors, might contribute to older adults' stronger positivity biases for past choices (Mather & Johnson, 2000), with the decline of executive control processes also playing a role (Mather & Johnson, 2003). ...
Aging differentially affects diverse aspects of memory functioning. In turn, memory changes have specific effects on different judgment and decision-making tasks. This chapter focuses on the consequences of age-related changes in memory processes—including working memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, and implicit memory—and how these changes affect performance on judgment and decision-making tasks. A review of relevant research shows how the decline in working memory negatively affects performance on the more cognitively demanding decision-making tasks. It also shows that working memory plays a central role in explaining the age-related decline in decision making. Moreover, the review illustrates how different memory processes, showing distinct age-related trajectories, may functionally support performance on different kinds of judgment and decision-making tasks. Finally, the chapter discusses how age-related memory changes may interact with other cognitive and noncognitive changes in shaping decision-making behavior.
... event predictions (Roese & Maniar, 1997), legal judgments (Arkes & Schipani, 1994), economic predictions (Hölzl, Kirchler, & Rodler, 2002), and auditing judgments (Reimers & Butler, 1992) to name a few. It has been shown in children and in older adults (Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007), and recently has been demonstrated in additional sensory domains, including gustatory (Pohl, Schwarz, Sczesny, & Stahlberg, 2003) and visual (Cavillo & Gomes, 2011;Harley, Carlsen, & Loftus, 2004). Indeed, a potential criticism of the field is that it is more enamored of cataloging the bias than it is with examining its theoretical underpinnings. ...
Thirty-five years since the publication of Fischhoff’s (1975) seminal article, we continue to be fascinated by the hindsight bias. Like a well-developed character in a novel, the bias has something for everyone. Its basic tenet – that things seem less surprising in hindsight than they should – is instantly recognizable as a common human flaw. It is robust, often difficult to reduce, and appeals to researchers with a wide range of interests including history, business, law, medicine, and of course, psychology. This interest stems from the belief that failure to be surprised by an event prevents us from learning from it, and will likely cause us to judge others unfairly for not having been able to foresee it. But just how bad is it? Although guided by a cold cognitive mechanism that ‘creeps up’ on us, hindsight bias is complex, seemingly strengthened, and yet also reduced by self-serving motives. In this article, I introduce the reader to the basic designs used to study the bias, key cognitive and motivational mechanisms, the major controversies, and some unstudied questions that I hope will guide future research.
... In addition, like standard dual-processes, specific biases are attributed to intuitive processes (although some biases are also attributed to retrieval failure and to interference). Hindsight bias, for example, in which people falsely remember that they predicted an outcome once they know that it occurred, depends on both gist memories (subjective interpretations of events influenced by outcomes) as well as a failure to retrieve verbatim memories of what was actually predicted (Bayen, Pohl, Erdfelder, & Auer, 2007;Bernstein, Erdfelder, Meltzoff, Peria, & Loftus, 2011;. ...
From Piaget to the present, traditional and dual-process theories have predicted improvement in reasoning from childhood to adulthood, and improvement has been observed. However, developmental reversals-that reasoning biases emerge with development -have also been observed in a growing list of paradigms. We explain how fuzzy-trace theory predicts both improvement and developmental reversals in reasoning and decision making. Drawing on research on logical and quantitative reasoning, as well as on risky decision making in the laboratory and in life, we illustrate how the same small set of theoretical principles apply to typical neurodevelopment, encompassing childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and to neurological conditions such as autism and Alzheimer's disease. For example, framing effects-that risk preferences shift when the same decisions are phrases in terms of gains versus losses-emerge in early adolescence as gist-based intuition develops. In autistic individuals, who rely less on gist-based intuition and more on verbatim-based analysis, framing biases are attenuated (i.e., they outperform typically developing control subjects). In adults, simple manipulations based on fuzzy-trace theory can make framing effects appear and disappear depending on whether gist-based intuition or verbatim-based analysis is induced. These theoretical principles are summarized and integrated in a new mathematical model that specifies how dual modes of reasoning combine to produce predictable variability in performance. In particular, we show how the most popular and extensively studied model of decision making-prospect theory-can be derived from fuzzy-trace theory by combining analytical (verbatim-based) and intuitive (gist-based) processes.
... Apparently, the mechanism of itemspecific retroactive inhibition, assumed to underlie recollection biases in within-subjects hindsight bias designs , shows no clear developmental trend across the life span. Hence, this mechanism cannot be equated simply with susceptibility to retroactive interference or lack of inhibition, both of which have been argued to follow U-shaped curves across the life span ( Bayen et al., 2007;Hasher & Zacks, 1988). ...
Upon learning the outcome to a problem, people tend to believe that they knew it all along (hindsight bias). Here, we report the first study to trace the development of hindsight bias across the life span. One hundred ninety-four participants aged 3 to 95 years completed 3 tasks designed to measure visual and verbal hindsight bias. All age groups demonstrated hindsight bias on all 3 tasks; however, preschoolers and older adults exhibited more bias than older children and younger adults. Multinomial processing tree analyses of these data revealed that preschoolers' enhanced hindsight bias resulted from them substituting the correct answer for their original answer in their recall (a qualitative error). Conversely, older adults' enhanced hindsight bias resulted from them forgetting their original answer and recalling an answer closer to, but not equal to, the correct answer (a quantitative error). We discuss these findings in relation to mechanisms of memory, perspective taking, theory of mind, and executive function.
Hindsight bias - also known as the knew-it-all-along effect - is a ubiquitous judgment error affecting decision makers. Hindsight bias has been shown to vary across age groups and as a function of contextual factors, such as the decision maker's emotional state. Despite theoretical reasons why emotions might have a stronger impact on hindsight bias in older than in younger adults, age differences in hindsight bias for emotional events remain relatively underexplored. We examined emotion and hindsight bias in younger and older adults (N = 272) against the backdrop of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Participants predicted electoral college votes for the two presidential candidates before the election and were asked to remember their predictions approximately three weeks later, after the election results had been finalised. Republicans, for whom the electoral outcome was negatively tinged, exhibited greater hindsight bias for President Biden's result compared with Democrats, for whom the electoral outcome was positive. The asymmetry in hindsight bias between Republicans and Democrats was similar for younger and older participants. This study suggests that negative emotions may exacerbate hindsight bias, and that adult age differences in hindsight bias observed in laboratory settings may not translate to real-world contexts.
We conducted three experiments to test the fluency-misattribution account of auditory hindsight bias. According to this account, prior exposure to a clearly presented auditory stimulus produces fluent (improved) processing of a distorted version of that stimulus, which results in participants mistakenly rating that item as easy to identify. In all experiments, participants in an exposure phase heard clearly spoken words zero, one, three, or six times. In the test phase, we examined auditory hindsight bias by manipulating whether participants heard a clear version of a target word just prior to hearing the distorted version of that word. Participants then estimated the ability of naïve peers to identify the distorted word. Auditory hindsight bias and the number of priming presentations during the exposure phase interacted underadditively in their prediction of participants' estimates: When no clear version of the target word appeared prior to the distorted version of that word in the test phase, participants identified target words more often the more frequently they heard the clear word in the exposure phase. Conversely, hearing a clear version of the target word at test produced similar estimates, regardless of the number of times participants heard clear versions of those words during the exposure phase. As per Roberts and Sternberg's (Attention and Performance XIV, pp. 611-653, 1993) additive factors logic, this finding suggests that both auditory hindsight bias and repetition priming contribute to a common process, which we propose involves a misattribution of processing fluency. We conclude that misattribution of fluency accounts for auditory hindsight bias.
Individuals exhibit hindsight bias when they are unable to recall their original responses to novel questions after correct answers are provided to them. Prior studies have eliminated hindsight bias by modifying the conditions under which original judgments or correct answers are encoded. Here, we explored whether hindsight bias can be eliminated by manipulating the conditions that hold at retrieval. Our retrieval-based approach predicts that if the conditions at retrieval enable sufficient discrimination of memory representations of original judgments from memory representations of correct answers, then hindsight bias will be reduced or eliminated. Experiment 1 used the standard memory design to replicate the hindsight bias effect in middle-school students. Experiments 2 and 3 modified the retrieval phase of this design, instructing participants beforehand that they would be recalling both their original judgments and the correct answers. As predicted, this enabled participants to form compound retrieval cues that discriminated original judgment traces from correct answer traces, and eliminated hindsight bias. Experiment 4 found that when participants were not instructed beforehand that they would be making both recalls, they did not form discriminating retrieval cues, and hindsight bias returned. These experiments delineate the retrieval conditions that produce-and fail to produce-hindsight bias.
The same event that appeared unpredictable in foresight can be judged as predictable in hindsight. Hindsight bias clouds judgments in all areas of life, including legal decisions, medical diagnoses, consumer satisfaction, sporting events, and election outcomes. We discuss three theoretical constructs related to hindsight bias: memory, reconstruction bias, and motivation. Attempts to recall foresight knowledge fail because newly acquired knowledge affects memory either directly or indirectly by biasing attempts to reconstruct foresight knowledge. On a metacognitive level, overconfidence and surprise contribute to hindsight bias. Overconfidence in knowledge increases hindsight bias whereas a well-calibrated confidence reduces hindsight bias. Motivational factors also contribute to hindsight bias by making positive and negative outcomes appear more or less likely, depending on a variety of factors. We review hindsight bias theories and discuss three exciting directions for future research.
Hindsight bias has traditionally been regarded in light of general laws of information processing and memory. The current review presents a complementary view of hindsight bias, summarizing research on individual differences in the magnitude of the bias. According to an individual difference perspective, the magnitude of the bias is influenced by individual traits, needs, and motives, and not exclusively the result of rational, if sometimes faulty, information processing. Our review emphasizes those traits that, on theoretical grounds, have been argued to moderate the magnitude of hindsight bias. Empirical evidence regarding their possible influence is discussed and evaluated. The variables that seem to be most strongly associated with the magnitude of hindsight bias are field dependence, intelligence, and self-presentational concerns. The negligence of design considerations, a sometimes low reliability of hindsight measures, and insufficient statistical power are discussed as major methodological problems. Recommendations for future research are given.
Since Baruch Fischhoff's (1975) groundbreaking paper opened up a whole new research field, more than 150 journal articles and book chapters, two meta-analyses (Christensen-Szalanski & Willham, 1991; Guilbault, Bryant, Brockway & Posavac, 2004), and one special issue (Memory, 2003, edited by Ulrich Hoffrage & Rodiger Pohl) have addressed hindsight phenomena. The current editorial aims to provide a rough roadmap to the hindsight bias research landscape. It highlights some important Iandmarks and developments of the last 30 years and puts the 13 articles of the present special issue into a historical and systematic perspective.
The authors investigated the possibility that working memory span tasks are influenced by interference and that interference contributes to the correlation between span and other measures. Younger and older adults received the span task either in the standard format or one designed to reduce the impact of interference with no impact on capacity demands. Participants then read and recalled a short prose passage. Reducing the amount of interference in the span task raised span scores, replicating previous results (C. P. May, L. Hasher, & M. J. Kane, 1999). The same interference-reducing manipulations that raised span substantially altered the relation between span and prose recall. These results suggest that span is influenced by interference, that age differences in span may be due to differences in the ability to overcome interference rather than to differences in capacity, and that interference plays an important role in the relation between span and other tasks.
Notes that a major difference between historical and nonhistorical judgment is that the historical judge typically knows how things turned out. 3 experiments are described with a total of 479 college students. In Exp I, receipt of such outcome knowledge was found to increase the postdicted likelihood of reported events and change the perceived relevance of event-descriptive data, regardless of the likelihood of the outcome and the truth of the report. Ss were, however, largely unaware of the effect that outcome knowledge had on their perceptions. As a result, they overestimated what they would have known without outcome knowledge (Exp II), as well as what others (Exp III) actually did know without outcome knowledge. It is argued that this lack of awareness can seriously restrict one's ability to judge or learn from the past. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Publisher Summary
This chapter discusses the theoretical and empirical literature that addresses aging and discourse comprehension. A series of five studies guided by a particular working memory viewpoint regarding the formation of inferences during discourse processing is described in the chapter. Compensatory strategies may be used with different degrees of likelihood across the life span largely as a function of efficiency with which inhibitory mechanisms function because these largely determine the facility with which memory can be searched. The consequences for discourse comprehension in particular may be profound because the establishment of a coherent representation of a message hinges on the timely retrieval of information necessary to establish coreference among certain critical ideas. Discourse comprehension is an ideal domain for assessing limited capacity frameworks because most models of discourse processing assume that multiple components, demanding substantially different levels of cognitive resources, are involved. For example, access to a lexical representation from either a visual array or an auditory message is virtually capacity free.
We propose that hindsight bias in adults and some limitations in children's "theory of mind" (ToM), or mental-state reasoning, share a core cognitive constraint: a tendency to be biased by one's current knowledge when at- tempting to recall, or reason about, a more naive cognitive state—regardless of whether that more naive state is one's own earlier naive state or someone else's. That is, hindsight bias is a fundamental problem in cognitive perspec- tive-taking. We review the developmental literature on hindsight bias as well as other limitations that resemble hindsight bias. We believe that some of children's limitations in ToM may stem, from the same core component as hindsight bias, and thus, will shed light on the underlying mechanisms. We discuss several processes that may contribute to this biased perspective-tak- ing. We believe a developmental approach is necessary for a comprehen- sive understanding of the nature of hindsight bias in social cognition.
Presents a 2-factor hypothesis for the spacing effect in free recall of 2-item clusters: (a) The information and storage of clusters is more likely with small within-category spacing, and (b) the retrieval of clusters is more likely with large within-category spacing. The hypothesis was studied on 3 levels of increasing theoretical sophistication; Ss were 76 undergraduates. Central to all the analyses was the representation of pair-clustering data in terms of basic events in an underlying sample space. At the lowest level, descriptive measures of category recall are shown to vary with spacing in a complex manner that is consistent with, but in no way demonstrative of, the 2-factor hypothesis. Next, a simple statistical model is formulated that permits measurement of hypothetical storage and retrieval contributions to pair clustering. A study of these 2 quantities provides direct support for the 2-factor hypothesis. Finally, the 2-factor hypothesis is embedded in a multilevel Markov model for pair clustering that postulates separate short- and long-term memory states. The model provides a good account of trial-to-trial changes in the basic events of pair clustering. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
After having received feedback about the correct answer to a question, a memory judgment about one's own past answer, the original judgment (OJ), is often biased toward the feedback. The authors present a multinomial model that explains this hindsight bias effect in terms of both memory impairments and reconstruction biases for nonrecollected OJs. The model was tested in 4 experiments. As predicted, the parameters measuring OJ recollection could be influenced selectively by contrasting items whose OJs were or were not retrieved successfully earlier (Experiment 1). Increasing the feedback-recall delay reduced reconstruction biases exclusively (Experiment 2), whereas discrediting the feedback enhanced recollection of the OJs to feedback items (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, the model's guessing parameters, but no other parameters, varied as a function of the number of response alternatives. The authors discuss implications for hindsight bias theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The hindsight bias is the tendency for people with outcome knowledge to believe falsely that they would have predicted the reported outcome of an event. This article reviews empirical research relevant to hindsight phenomena. The influence of outcome knowledge, termed
creeping determinism, was initially hypothesized to result from the immediate and automatic integration of the outcome into a person's knowledge of an event. Later research has identified at least 4 plausible, general strategies for responding to hindsight questions. These explanations postulate that outcome information affects the selection of evidence to make a judgment, the evidence evaluation, the manner in which evidence is integrated, or the response generation process. It is also likely, in some situations, that a combination of 2 or more of these mechanisms produces the observed hindsight effects. We provide an interpretation of the creeping determinism hypothesis in terms of inferences made to reevaluate case-specific evidence once the relevant outcome is known and conclude that it is the most common mechanism underlying observed hindsight effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two studies are discussed in which children's use of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic was considered. Study one is a
modification of the classic multiplication task devised by Kahneman and Tversky (1974). Results indicate that children in
grades 4, 6, 8 and adults are affected by the order of numbers provided in an addition task. In addition, younger children
display the tendency to over adjust, yielding higher estimates. In the second study, third and fifth grade participants and
adults were provided anchors and estimated the number of jellybeans in a glass container. A main effect for condition is indicated,
with lower anchors leading to lower estimates. Results of both studies are consistent with the an anchoring and adjustment
explanation.
Judges who had estimated the likelihood of various possible outcomes of President Nixon's trips to Peking and Moscow were unexpectedly asked to remember, or reconstruct in the event that they had forgotten, their own predictions some time after the visits were completed. In addition, they indicated whether or not they thought that each event had in fact occurred. Remembered—reconstructed probabilities were generally higher than the originally assigned probabilities for events believed to have occurred and lower for those which had not (although the latter effect was less pronounced). In their original predictions, subjects overestimated low probabilities and underestimated high probabilities, although they were generally quite accurate. Judging by their reconstructed—remembered probabilities, however, subjects seldom perceived having been very surprised by what had or had not happened. These results are discussed in terms of cognitive “anchoring” and possible detrimental effects of outcome feedback.
A total of 1,242 subjects, in five experiments plus a pilot study, saw a series of slides depicting a single auto-pedestrian accident. The purpose of these experiments was to investigate how information supplied after an event influences a witness's memory for that event. Subjects were exposed to either consistent, misleading, or irrelevant information after the accident event. Misleading information produced less accurate responding on both a yes-no and a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test. Further, misleading information had a larger impact if introduced just prior to a final test rather than immediately after the initial event. The effects of misleading information cannot be accounted for by a simple demand-characteristics explanation. Overall, the results suggest that information to which a witness is exposed after an event, whether that information is consistent or misleading, is integrated into the witness's memory of the event.
Age differences in memory for the source of memories were investigated using two different experimental paradigms. Experiment 1 used a reality monitoring paradigm. A series of actions were either performed, imagined, or watched, and subjects were later tested for their ability to recognize the actions and identify their origins. Elderly subjects made more false positive responses than did young subjects, and they made more source confusion errors, attributing actions to the wrong sources. Both new and imagined actions were most often misclassified as watched. Experiment 2 used an eyewitness testimony paradigm. After watching a film, subjects read a written version of the story. A recognition test showed that elderly subjects were more often misled by false information in the story than were the younger subjects, and were more confident that their erroneous responses were correct. The findings suggest that a decline in memory for sources may diminish the accuracy of elderly witnesses.
The claim that a person's memory for an event may be altered by information encountered after the event has been influential in shaping current conceptions of memory. The basis for the claim is a series of studies showing that subjects who are given false or misleading information about a previously witnessed event perform more poorly on tests of memory for the event than subjects who are not misled. In this article we argue that the available evidence does not imply that misleading postevent information impairs memory for the original event, because the procedure used in previous studies is inappropriate for assessing effects of misleading information on memory. We then introduce a more appropriate procedure and report six experiments using this procedure. We conclude from the results that misleading postevent information has no effect on memory for the original event. We then review several recent studies that seem to contradict this conclusion, showing that the studies do not pose problems for our position. Finally, we discuss the implications of our conclusions for broader issues concerning memory.
If subjects are asked to recollect a former response after having been informed about the correct response, their recollection
tends to approach the correct response. This effect has been termedhindsight bias. We studied hindsight bias in an experiment requiring numerical responses to almanac-type questions for physical quantities.
We varied (1) the time at which the correct information was provided, (2) the encoding of the original responses by asking/not
asking subjects to give a reason for the respective response, and (3) the motivation to recall correctly. We found that hindsight
is less biased if reasons are given and if the correct information is provided at an earlier time. Motivation had only interactive
effects: (1) With high motivation to recall correctly, the time the correct information was provided had no influence. (2)
With reasons given, the variation of motivation showed no effect. These results rule out purely motivational and purely automatic
explanations.
Four experiments examined age differences on indirect memory tests as a function of (a) the status of a stimulus as target or distractor and (b) the degree of predictability of a stimulus from context. No differences between young and old adults were found when targets were clearly designated as such. In this situation, participants showed priming for unexpected but not expected stimuli whether these words appeared as targets or distractors. In contrast, age differences emerged when there was initial uncertainty on each trial as to which stimulus was the target. It is concluded that aging is associated with a decrease in the efficiency of mechanisms involved in selection.
Our response to the Burke and McDowd critiques (in this issue) begins with a history of the origins of the inhibitory deficit
view and of its development since 1988 as well as with an account of some particularly useful findings and of our preferred
mode of theory building, which is nonformal and empirically driven. Against this background, we find
many points of agreement with Burke and McDowd but also many points of disagreement. For example, we agree with Burke that
many aspects of language comprehension and production are age invariant, but we disagree that all such findings count against
our viewpoint. Likewise, we readily acknowledge the problems in measuring inhibition that McDowd so clearly documents, but
do not feel that this is a fatal problem as long as the inhibitory deficit view continues to be viable within the basic attentional
literature, continues to permit the integration of a large body of existing data, and continues to generate new predictions.
In this review, we describe a shift that has taken place in the area of developmental suggestibility. Formerly, studies in this area indicated that there were pronounced age-related differences in suggestibility, with preschool children being particularly susceptible to misleading suggestions. The studies on which this conclusion was based were criticized on several grounds (e.g. unrealistic scenarios, truncated age range). Newer studies that have addressed these criticisms, however, have largely confirmed the earlier conclusions. These studies indicate that preschool children are disproportionately vulnerable to a variety of suggestive influences. There do not appear to any strict boundary conditions to this conclusion, and preschool children will sometimes succumb to suggestions about bodily touching, emotional events, and participatory events. The evidence for this assertion is presented in this review.
The authors investigated the influence of test format on the source-memory performance of older adults (N = 128). Each participant viewed a picture and wrote a description of the scene. Then half of the participants (control group) read a text that accurately described the scene; the other half (misled group) read a text that contained misinformation. After writing another scene description, the participants were given a surprise memory test. Half were given a yes/no recognition test, and half were given a source-monitoring test. The misled yes/no participants mistakenly indicated more often than the control yes/no participants that misleading-text items were in the picture (suggestibility effect). There was no suggestibility effect for source-monitoring participants. The data are discussed in terms of the source monitoring framework.
This study examined adult age differences in the accuracy, confidence ratings, and vividness ratings of veridical and suggested
memories. After seeing either one or two exposures of a vignette depicting a theft, young adults (M = 19 years) and older adults (M = 73 years) were given misleading information that suggested the presence of particular objects in the episode. Memory accuracy
was higher for younger adults than for older adults, and the frequency of falsely reporting the presence of suggested objects
was greater for older adults than for young adults. Further, levels of confidence and vividness ratings of the perceptual
attributes (colors, locations) of falsely recognized items were higher for older adults than for young adults. Both young
adults and older adults used more perceptual references when describing veridical memories than when describing suggested
memories. Age differences in the suggestibility of memory were attributed to nonspecific or nondissociated memory aging effects.
This review of children's testimony focuses on research related to memory for past experiences. The aspects of the memory system that are involved in testimony are discussed and the development of autobiographical memory is examined. Relevant research findings are summarized in the context of an information-processing model of memory and the implications of this work for clinical practice are outlined. We conclude that (1) under certain conditions, even very young children can remember and report past experiences with some accuracy over very long periods of time; (2) substantial and significant developmental differences have been demonstrated in children's abilities to provide eyewitness testimony; (3) children can be influenced in a variety of ways to provide complete and elaborated reports of events that never occurred; and (4) even experts cannot always tell the difference between true and false reports.
A recent meta-analysis (P. Verhaeghen & L. De Meersman, 1998a) revealed that older adults show a reliable but significantly reduced negative priming effect compared with young adults. The present study provides an updated quantitative review on the effect of aging on the magnitude of the negative priming effect in identity tasks. This analysis demonstrated that the negative priming effect was not significantly different between young and old adults. This result differs from P. Verhaeghen and L. De Meersman's study. The implications of this finding for inhibitory-based theories of cognitive aging are discussed.
Notes that a major difference between historical and nonhistorical judgment is that the historical judge typically knows how things turned out. 3 experiments are described with a total of 479 college students. In Exp I, receipt of such outcome knowledge was found to increase the postdicted likelihood of reported events and change the perceived relevance of event-descriptive data, regardless of the likelihood of the outcome and the truth of the report. Ss were, however, largely unaware of the effect that outcome knowledge had on their perceptions. As a result, they overestimated what they would have known without outcome knowledge (Exp II), as well as what others (Exp III) actually did know without outcome knowledge. It is argued that this lack of awareness can seriously restrict one's ability to judge or learn from the past. (16 ref)
Once people know the outcome of an event, they tend to overestimate what could have been anticipated in foresight. Although typically considered to be a robust phenomenon, this hindsight bias is subject to moderating circumstances. In their meta-analysis, Christensen-Szalanski and Willham (1991) observed that the more experience people have with the task under consideration, the smaller is the resulting hindsight bias. This observation is one benchmark against which the explanatory power of process models of hindsight bias can be measured. Therefore, we used it to put the recently proposed RAFT model (Hoffrage, Hertwig, & Gigerenzer, 2000) to another test. Our findings were consistent with the "expertise effect." Specifically, we observed-using computer simulations of the RAFT model-that the more comprehensive people's knowledge is in foresight, the smaller is their hindsight bias. In addition, we made two counterintuitive observations: First, the relation between foresight knowledge and hindsight bias appears to be independent of how knowledge is processed. Second, even if foresight knowledge is false, it can reduce hindsight bias. We conclude with a discussion of the functional value of hindsight bias.
Recently, an increasing number of researchers have proposed that interference/inhibition processes play an important role in human cognition. A number of models have suggested that susceptibility to interference is a major factor in cognitive development, cognitive aging, and certain atypical populations, such as learning disabled individuals and children with attention deficit disorders. By contrast, the relation between susceptibility to interference and measures of general cognitive ability in normal adults has received relatively little attention. In this article, we review the results of the few studies that have been addressed to this topic in the light of resistance to interference theory. We conclude by attempting to reconcile discrepancies both within and across studies.
Responses to an object may be slower or less accurate if that object shares attributes with a recently ignored object(negative priming). Some studies have found negative priming only if the probe trial required selection against a distractor stimulus. In the present experiment, subjects responded to the location of a target (O), ignoring a distractor (X) if it appeared in another location. Reaction time was slower to probe targets that appeared in the same location as the prime distractor, regardless of whether or not the probe target was accompanied by a distractor.
Abstract The present study explores the neural basis of the development of inhibitory control by combining functional neuroimaging with a parametric manipulation of a go-nogo paradigm. We demonstrate how the maturation of ventral fronto-striatal circuitry underlies the development of this ability. We used event-related fMRI to examine the effect of interference on neural processes involved in inhibitory control in children and adults. Nogo trials were preceded by either 1, 3 or 5 go trials and then compared to one another. Both children and adults showed an increase in errors with increasing interference. Successful response inhibition was associated with stronger activation of prefrontal and parietal regions for children than for adults. In adults, activation in ventral prefrontal regions increased with increasing interference from go trials. Unlike adults, the circuitry appeared to be maximally activated in children when suppressing a behavioral response regardless of the number of preceding responses. Furthermore, activation in ventral fronto-striatal regions correlated with both age and performance. These findings suggest that immature cognition is more susceptible to interference and this is paralleled by maturational differences in underlying fronto-striatal circuitry.
We conducted a meta-analysis of research on hindsight bias to gain an up-to-date summary of the overall strength of hindsight effects and to test hypotheses about potential moderators of hindsight distortion. A total of 95 studies (83 published and 12 unpublished) were included, and 252 independent effect sizes were coded for moderator variables in 3 broad categories involving characteristics of the study, of measurement, and of the experimental manipulation. When excluding missing effect sizes, the overall mean effect size was M d = .39 with a 95% confidence interval of .36 to .42. Five main findings emerged: (a) effect sizes calculated from objective probability estimates were larger than effect sizes calculated from subjective probability estimates; (b) effect sizes of studies that used almanac questions were larger than effect sizes of studies that used real-world events or case histories; (c) studies that included neutral outcomes resulted in larger effect sizes than studies that used positive or negative outcomes; (d) studies that included manipulations to increase hindsight bias resulted in significantly larger effect sizes than studies in which there were no manipulations to reduce or increase hindsight bias; and (e) studies that included manipulations to reduce hindsight bias did not produce lower effect sizes. These findings contribute to our understanding of hindsight bias by updating the state of knowledge, widening the range of known moderator variables, identifying factors that may activate different mediating processes, and highlighting critical gaps in the research literature.
Zusammenfassung. Der Ruckschaufehler (engl. “hindsight bias“) beschreibt die Tendenz, sich bei Schatzaufgaben durch vorgegebene Informationen systematisch beeinflussen zu lassen. Dieses Phanomen ist gut untersucht, allerdings ist seine entwicklungspsychologische Genese noch vollig unklar. Deshalb haben wir 274 Kinder und Erwachsene gebeten, die Antworten auf schwierige numerische Wissensfragen zu schatzen. Zu jeder Frage wurde ein niedriger oder hoher Wert als “Schatzung einer anderen Person“ (einer “Lehrerin“ oder eines “Schulers“) vorgegeben. Die Versuchspersonen wurden instruiert, diese Information bei ihrer Schatzung nicht zu berucksichtigen. Die Ergebnisse zeigten einen deutlichen Ruckschaufehler, d. h. auf niedrige Werte erfolgten niedrigere Schatzungen als auf hohe Werte. Dieser Effekt war bei den Kindern starker ausgepragt als bei den Erwachsenen. Die Quelle des vorgegebenen Wertes (“Lehrerin“ oder “Schuler“) wirkte sich dabei nicht aus. Die Ergebnisse werden im Rahmen des kognitiven Prozessmodell...
We report six experiments, involving nearly 1000 subjects, that investigate people's tendency to indicate “I knew it all along” with reference to facts that we are sure they would not have recalled without benefit of study. Subjects studied factual statements before doing a general knowledge test. “Knew-it” subjects were told to write only the answers they would have recalled without benefit of study, but they wrote about 20% too many answers; based on this finding, we would conclude that people mistake recently learned answers for previous knowledge. However, “learned-it” subjects, who were told to write only answers they learned during the experiment, tended to write the correct number; given this finding, we would conclude that people have an excellent ability to discriminate between the two sources of available answers. The two conclusions can't both be right. Either people have the needed information in mind, but the knew-it test distracts them from it, or they don't, but can adopt strategies for the learned-it test that give accurate performance. We conclude it's a bit of both.
In order to examine within-domain variations in children's knowledge of the events or materials to be remembered and corresponding differences in recall, a new procedure for studying the knowledge-memory linkage is introduced. To illustrate this approach, a sample of 5-year-olds was interviewed about their understanding of routine, pediatric examinations and the resulting normative data were related to the recall scores of other children who had participated in a study of memory for visits to the doctor. By calculating the proportion of children who nominated each feature of the physical examination (e.g., heart check, urine sample) in response to open-ended questions about what usually happens during a checkup, it was possible to compute “knowledge scores” for each component of the examination. Comparable “memory scores” for the examination features were obtained by reanalyzing previously obtained data of 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds' immediate and delayed retention of specific well-child office visits. Correlations among knowledge scores and memory scores for the 5-year-olds were significant and increased somewhat as a function of length of the delay interval. For the 3- and 7-year-olds, the correlations between knowledge and memory were significant with one exception; however, these correlations were of a smaller magnitude and did not increase as a function of delay interval.
The study examined developmental patterns of the negative effect of misleading post-event information in two different kinds of eyewitness interviews. A total of 284 subjects aged between five and 64 years were shown a short video about a theft and three weeks as well as four weeks later questioned about it. The social pressure in the interview after three weeks was manipulated by asking half of the subjects suggestive and misleading questions. The other half was asked open-ended and unbiased questions. In the neutral interview four weeks later, all subjects were asked the same set of recognition questions about the event. The results revealed that preschoolers in particular had problems with the interplay between cognitive and social factors (social pressure induced through the wording of the misleading questions) in the interview setting after three weeks. In the neutral recognition test, all age groups were shown to suffer from prior misinformation to about the same extent. However, with an exception in the group of 6-year-old children the negative effect of prior misinformation on the accuracy of recognition proved to be due to items that were peripheral to the observed event. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Hindsight bias is a robust phenomenon; it has been found with different designs, materials, and measures. However, several methodological problems may hinder an adequate analysis and interpretation of results obtained in experimental studies of the effect. This article therefore systematizes and critically discusses relevant features of designs, materials, and types of feedback, as well as different operationalizations and indices of hindsight bias. In particular, the potential confound of recollection and reconstruction, which may lead to inadequate theoretical conclusions, is addressed.
Outcome knowledge can affect hindsight judgments in two different ways. First, learning about the outcome of an event can impair recollection of one's own earlier predictions concerning this event. Second, outcome knowledge can affect the reconstruction of past predictions given that they cannot be recollected. We refer to these two hindsight effects as "recollection bias" and "reconstruction bias," respectively. Although theories differ as to whether they attribute hindsight bias primarily to recollection impairments or to reconstruction mechanisms, most research has been restricted to reconstruction processes in hindsight. In this article, we focus on recollection bias. We review previous research and summarize four experiments that studied item-specific and item-unspecific interference effects contributing to this recollection bias. The results can be explained in the framework of well-established theories of human memory.
Two experiments examined age-related differences in a misinformation paradigm. Young and elderly participants studied a list of related word pairs (e.g. bed sheet) and were then given a cued-recall test (“bed s_ee_” presented as cues for recall of “sheet”). A ‘prime’ stimulus was presented briefly before each test trial. On congruent trials the prime was the target word from study (sheet) whereas on incongruent trials the prime was a related word that was a plausible response but not the target (sleep). On baseline trials, the prime was a string of ampersands. When forced to respond (Expt. 1), both young and elderly participants demonstrated a bias to respond with the prime word, although the elderly showed a larger false memory effect as measured by higher false recalls on incongruent relative to baseline trials. When given the option to pass (Expt. 2), elderly participants continued to exhibit a large bias toward the prime word whereas young participants tended to pass when they were unable to recall the target. Results are interpreted in terms of an accessibility bias, which influences guessing and is a basis of responding independent of recollection. Discussion focuses on the importance of studying age-related changes in bias and recollection along with neural correlates of these changes.
Presents a statistical theory for a model originally developed by the present authors (see record
1980-27106-001), which is intended for researchers who have hypotheses about the effects of independent variables on storage and retrieval processes in human memory that do not demand any particular human paradigm. An experimental paradigm for collecting data to be analyzed is given. Parameter estimation is provided assuming independent observations under constant conditions, along with confidence regions for the parameters. Hypothesis-testing methods based on the likelihood ratio method are developed for a variety of hypotheses when observations are available from several experimental conditions; these methods are illustrated with a data set. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The present study investigated the effects of mental reinstatement of the context in which misleading information about an event was presented on later recognition memory for the event. Five-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults were shown a short video depicting a children's adventure and were asked a set of misleading questions to introduce misinformation one week later. Before the recognition memory test was administered another week later, half of the participants were given instructions to mentally reinstate the context of the misleading interview. Memory was assessed with a set of forced-choice recognition questions once in the misleading interview context and for the children a second time at home one week later. When participants were instructed to mentally reinstate the context of the misleading interview prior to the recognition test, false memory reports occurred more often for adults than for children and had a stronger impact on peripheral information than on central information for both 7-year-olds and adults. When 5- and 7-year-olds were tested at home, false memory reports decreased. Thus, reinstating the context of an interview introducing misinformation can reduce the accuracy of memory reports; the context dependence of both accurate and inaccurate memory reports in children and adults is discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This research evaluated the effect of several variations of a Cognitive interview on 4–5-year-old children's correct recall and subsequent reporting of misinformation. Children viewed an event followed by misinformation that was read or self-generated before a Cognitive interview. Children were then given recognition tests under inclusion and exclusion instructions. Developmentally modified Cognitive interviews elicited significantly more correct details than control interviews. A Cognitive interview given after misinformation reduced children's reporting of misinformation at interview and reduced reporting of self-generated misinformation on memory tests. Moreover, this research shows that the report all and context reinstatement Cognitive interview mnemonics in combination can offer some protection against the negative effect of misinformation when given after such misinformation. Process dissociation analyses revealed that both recollection and familiarity contributed to children's reporting of misinformation. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cued recall of the last target words of primarily four-word category (Bus-Airplane-Car-Train) and thematic (Suitcase-Coat-Ticket-Train) stimuli by children and adults was examined in five experiments. The purpose was to examine problems of gaining access to episodie search sets in recall. Stimulus classification at acquisition was ensured by orienting questions. In order to manipulate access difficulty, search sets were externalized more or less at retrieval by providing cues reinstating the whole (Bus-Airplane-Car) or only part (Bus-Airplane, or Bus) of the associative context in Experiments 1 and 2, by varying two-, three-, or four-word stimuli in Experiment 3, by asking a retrieval orienting question for context cues in Experiment 4, and by presenting the names of the associative domains (e.g., Vehicle) as cues in Experiment 5. In addition both target (i.e., Train) and missing context word recall were examined in Experiments 1 and 2. The results suggest that access to a search set is more of a problem for children than for adults, and for children at least, access to an episodic search set and to an appropriate associative domain probably should be distinguished. Access differences may reflect properties of the associative structures of memory.
We compared young and older adults' source monitoring performance on an explicit source identification test using the misinformation paradigm. Several age-related differences in source memory were demonstrated: (a) older adults were more likely than were young adults to say that they saw information that was actually only suggested to them; (b) older adults were more confident in their false memories than were young adults; (c) older adults were less confident in their accurate memory for the source of information than were young adults. Together, the data suggest that older adults either lacked or failed to use helpful diagnostic source information (e.g. perceptual details or temporal information), and that their confidence in their false memories reflected an over-weighting of semantic information. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Research on theory of mind increasingly encompasses apparently contradictory findings. In particular, in initial studies, older preschoolers consistently passed false-belief tasks — a so-called “definitive” test of mental-state understanding — whereas younger children systematically erred. More recent studies, however, have found evidence of false-belief understanding in 3-year-olds or have demonstrated conditions that improve children's performance. A meta-analysis was conducted (N= 178 separate studies) to address the empirical inconsistencies and theoretical controversies. When organized into a systematic set of factors that vary across studies, false-belief results cluster systematically with the exception of only a few outliers. A combined model that included age, country of origin, and four task factors (e.g., whether the task objects were transformed in order to deceive the protagonist or not) yielded a multiple R of .74 and an R2 of .55; thus, the model accounts for 55% of the variance in false-belief performance. Moreover, false-belief performance showed a consistent developmental pattern, even across various countries and various task manipulations: preschoolers went from below-chance performance to above-chance performance. The findings are inconsistent with early competence proposals that claim that developmental changes are due to tasks artifacts, and thus disappear in simpler, revised false-belief tasks; and are, instead, consistent with theoretical accounts that propose that understanding of belief, and, relatedly, understanding of mind, exhibit genuine conceptual change in the preschool years.
Individual differences in memory and suggestibility were assessed in an experiment involving 1989 people who attended the Exploratorium, a science museum located in San Francisco. Subjects watched a brief film clip of an assault and later answered questions about it. Approximately half received misinformation about some critical items. Four demographic variables (gender, educational level, age, and occupation) were examined to determine their impact on memory performance. The principle of discrepancy detection predicts that, compared to individuals with a good memory, people who have poor memory to begin with will be relatively suggestible (that is susceptible to misinformation). Some of our findings were consistent with this principle. For example, children (5–10 years) and elderly (over 65) were relatively inaccurate and also relatively suggestible. Other findings were not consistent with the principle, for example the finding that artists and architects were relatively accurate, but they were also highly suggestible.
We review six explanatory dimensions of false memory in children that are relevant to forensic practice: measurement, development, social factors, individual differences, varieties of memories and memory judgments, and varieties of procedures that induce false memories. We conclude that, despite greater fidelity to real-world false memory contexts, recent studies fail to use known techniques that separate mere acquiescence from memory changes. Acquiescence and memory interact in interrogation through a dynamic process of construing both questions and memories. Fuzzy-trace theory’s verbatim–gist distinction offers an explanation for how this construal process can transform acquiescence into false memory. Acquiescence and false memory are further exacerbated by individual differences in cognition, personality, and social factors. To avoid such effects, interviewers should not encourage children to consider, imagine, or interpret alternative versions of events, especially with repeated specific questions rather than open-ended free recall. The goal of interviews should be not only to separate truth from falsity, but also to separate the fuzzy truth, the construal of questions and gist memories, from the verbatim “just-the-facts” truth required for the administration of justice.
This research concerns the development of children's understanding of representational change and its relation to other cognitive developments. Children were shown deceptive objects, and the true nature of the objects was then revealed. Children were then asked what they thought the object was when they first saw it, testing their understanding of representational change; what another child would think the object was, testing their understanding of false belief; and what the object looked like and really was, testing their understanding of the appearance-reality distinction. Most 3-year-olds answered the representational change question incorrectly. Most 5-year-olds did not make this error. Children's performance on the representational change question was poorer than their performance on the false-belief question. There were correlations between performance on all 3 tasks. Apparently children begin to be able to consider alternative representations of the same object at about age 4.
Children's attention to knowledge-acquisition events was examined in 4 experiments in which children were taught novel facts and subsequently asked how long they had known the new information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds tended to claim they had known novel animal facts for a long time and also reported that other children would know the novel facts. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, using facts associated with chemistry demonstrations. In Experiments 3 and 4, children were taught new color words. 5-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, distinguished between novel and familiar color words, reporting they had not known the novel words before the test session, but they had always known the familiar words. 4-year-olds in Experiment 4 were better able to distinguish novel and familiar color words when the teaching of the novel words was an explicit and salient part of the procedure.
We review a current and popular class of cognitive models called multinomial processing tree (MPT) models. MPT models are simple, substantively motivated statistical models that can be applied to categorical data. They are useful as data-analysis tools for measuring underlying or latent cognitive capacities and as simple models for representing and testing competing psychological theories. We formally describe the cognitive structure and parametric properties of the class of MPT models and provide an inferential statistical analysis for the entire class. Following this, we provide a comprehensive review of over 80 applications of MPT models to a variety of substantive areas in cognitive psychology, including various types of human memory, visual and auditory perception, and logical reasoning. We then address a number of theoretical issues relevant to the creation and evaluation of MPT models, including model development, model validity, discrete-state assumptions, statistical issues, and the relation between MPT models and other mathematical models. In the conclusion, we consider the current role of MPT models in psychological research and possible future directions.
Young children have problems reasoning about false beliefs. We suggest that this is at least partially the result of the same curse of knowledge that has been observed in adults--a tendency to be biased by one's own knowledge when assessing the knowledge of a more naive person. We tested 3- to 5-year-old children in a knowledge-attribution task and found that young children exhibited a curse-of-knowledge bias to a greater extent than older children, a finding that is consistent with their greater difficulty with false-belief tasks. We also found that children's misattributions were asymmetric. They were limited to cases in which the children were more knowledgeable than the other person; misattributions did not occur when the children were more ignorant than the other person. This suggests that their difficulty is better characterized by the curse of knowledge than by more general egocentrism or rationality accounts.