Processes leading to confidence and accuracy in sentence recognition: A metamemory approach

Abstract

We propose that memory confidence is based on the processes and products of the just-completed memory task, along with the participants’ metamemory beliefs about the relation of these processes and products to memory accuracy. We tested this metamemory approach to confidence by having participants carry out a simple recognition memory task with deceptive and nondeceptive items. The deceptive items were sentences that contained a possible synonym substitution, thus allowing errors based on gist memory. For nondeceptive items, high confidence was associated with high accuracy. For deceptive items the relationship reversed; high confidence was associated with low accuracy. A memory process questionnaire was developed that provided more differentiated phenomenal reports than the traditional know/remember distinction. For nondeceptive items, metamemory beliefs tended to be valid indicators of accuracy, but for deceptive items involving unconscious reconstructive memory processes, they tended to be invalid indicators of memory accuracy. The overall results lend strong support for our metamemory approach to memory confidence.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a grant from the University of Illinois Research Board. Portions of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Kansas City, Missouri, November 2002, and at the meeting of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, June 2001. The experiment reported in this article was part of Cristina Sampaio's Masters Thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

We would like to thank Rose Barlow, Ellen Brewer, and Brian Ross for comments on an earlier version of this article.