Do Older Adults Show Less Confidence in Their Monitoring of Learning?

Abstract

Although aging has a minimal effect on the accuracy of people's judgments of learning (JOLs) at predicting future memory performance, older adults may be less confident in these memory judgments—similar to the age declines often reported with memory self-efficacy. To evaluate this possibility, the authors had younger and older adults make JOLs for paired associates and rate their confidence in the accuracy of each JOL. Age-related declines in confidence in judgments were evident for immediate JOLs but not for delayed JOLs. Implications of these outcomes for theory of JOLs and explaining age-related differences in self-regulated study are discussed.

This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health (R37 AG13148). Results from the experiment were presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association in March, 2004. The authors thank Julie Baker and Joshua Kelley for their help in running the participants.

Notes

Note. “Freq.” = Frequency of Occurrence; “Conc.” = Concreteness; “Mean.” = Meaningfulness.Values are from Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan (1968). The frequency of the occurrence of the words represents the number of times the word appears per 1 million words; “A” and “AA” indicate “relatively high” frequencies of occurrence per million (i.e., > 50). Concreteness of the words was measured on a 7-point Likert scale with 1 indicating “highly abstract” and 7 meaning “highly concrete.” Meaningfulness of the words was measured by having participants free-associate to the target word; the number is the mean number of words free-associated to the target word. Values were not available for the words “planet” and “glass.”

¹Given that word frequency can influence people's metacognitive judgments via familiarity processes (Begg, Duft, Lalonde, Melnick, & Sanvito, 1989), older adults may be at an advantage if newer words—e.g., words that entered the vocabulary in the past decade—were included in the materials, perhaps because older adults would be less familiar with those items and hence could focus more on memorability per se. (We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this possibility.) In contrast to this possibility, the words comprising our paired associates were largely (except for, “planet” and “glass”) from a word list published in 1968 (Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968). Moreover, as shown in Table A1, the words were not highly polarized on the key dimensions—i.e., our list does not have a mix of concrete and abstract words. The mean concreteness rating for 130 of the 132 words used in this study (values were not available for “planet” and “glass”) was 6.8 (SD = .25) and the mean meaningfulness rating of these words was 6.8 (SD = .78). As the words were all chosen to be concrete and meaningful, it is not likely that extreme variability in either of these factors substantively influenced the age-relevant effects examined in the current research. The mean frequency rating was 31.6 per million (SD = 18.3; to compute mean values, the value of 50 was used for all words with ratings of “A” or “AA”).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael J. Serra

Current address Michael J. Serra is Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.