Retrieval demand, as implemented through test format and retrieval instructions, was varied across two misinformation experiments. Our goal was to examine whether increasing retrieval demand would improve the relationship between confidence and memory performance, and thereby reduce misinformation susceptibility. We hypothesized that improving the…

Metacognitive monitoring and control must be accurate and efficient in order to allow self-guided learners to improve their performance. Yet few examples exist in which allowing learners to control learning produces higher levels of performance than restricting learners' control. Here we investigate the consequences of allowing learners to…

Emotionality is a key component of subjective experience that influences memory. We tested how the emotionality of words affects memory monitoring, specifically, judgments of learning, in both cued recall and free recall paradigms. In both tasks, people predicted that positive and negative emotional words would be recalled better than neutral…

It is broadly agreed that the processing of a word triad with a common remote associate (coherent triad) leads to its partial activation, which is the process underlying intuitive coherence judgments. The present studies demonstrate that this process not only is independent of the intention to find the common associate (CA), but rather may be…

The present experiments represent a phenomenon in which people experienced an illusion of knowing such that they were overconfident in their ability to remember information they subsequently were unable to recall. Semantic associates of cues served as targets and were studied during the original and interpolated study phases of a retroactive…

This study investigated the heuristic bases of judgments of learning (JOLs). JOLs were elicited either immediately after study or after a shorter or longer delay. In Experiment 1, the effects of encoding fluency (inferred from self-paced study time) on both JOLs and recall decreased with JOL delay, whereas those of retrieval fluency (inferred from…

In two experiments, it is demonstrated that knowledge about idiosyncratic aspects of one's own memory performance may become the basis for inferences in recognition. In the first study, beliefs about the effect of the encoding conditions on memory were experimentally induced by varying the memory task such that participants' performance was…

Control over memory can be achieved in two ways: by constraining retrieval such that only sought after information comes to mind or, alternatively, by means of post-access monitoring. We used a memory-for-foils paradigm to gain evidence of differences in retrieval constraints. In this paradigm, participants studied words under deep or shallow…

Describes two experiments that looked at: (1) how accurately, in a multiple-trial learning situation, individuals are able to predict their own performance on a trial-by-trial basis over the entire course of acquisition; and (2) what information a person uses to predict his or her own acquisition performance. (SED)

In four experiments the behavioral consequences of an involuntary attentional distraction concerning memory performance was investigated. The working memory model of Cowan (1995) predicts a performance deficit for memory representations that are held in an active state when the focus of attention is distracted by a change in physical properties.…