Shared and distinct cue utilization for metacognitive judgements during reasoning and memorisation

ABSTRACT

Metacognitive research is dominated by meta-memory studies; meta-reasoning research is nascent. Accessibility – the number of associations for a stimulus – is a reliable heuristic cue for Feeling of Knowing when answering knowledge questions. We used a similar cue, subjective accessibility, for exposing commonalities and differences between meta-reasoning and meta-memory. In Experiment 1, participants faced solvable Compound Remote Associate problems mixed with unsolvable random word triads. We collected initial Judgement of Solvability (iJOS), final JOS (fJOS) and confidence. Experiment 2 focused on confidence, controlling for potential interactions among judgements. In Experiment 3, the participants memorised the same triads and rated Ease of Learning and Judgement of Learning. sAccessibility was associated with all judgements. Notably, it reliably predicted memory judgements and confidence in the provided solutions. However, it was unreliable for judging solvability (iJOS and fJOS). The findings highlight the importance of studying meta-reasoning for exposing the biasing factors in reasoning processes and for getting a broad perspective on metacognitive processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Reasoning
• memorisation
• meta-reasoning
• metacognition
• heuristic cues

Acknowledgments

We thank Shira Elqayam, Monika Undorf, Yael Sidi, and Tirza Lauterman for comments on early versions of this paper and Meira Ben-Gad for editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ CRA problems are a subset of the remote associates test (RAT; Mednick, 1962). The distinguishing feature of CRA problems is that the solution word is not merely associated with each cue word, as is the case in RAT problems, but forms a compound word or two-word phrase with each one.

² Although sAccessibility of the entire triad as a whole could potentially be examined, we chose to focus on sAccessibility at the component level, representing real-life situations as the examples described above.

³ Two additional sAccessibility calculations were examined: by word location (accessibility of the first, second and third words) and by maximum and minimum accessibilities in each problem. Mean accessibility showed the strongest predictive power, although the trends were highly similar with all calculation options.

⁴ Frequency data were collected by MILA (Knowledge Center for Processing Hebrew), http://mila.cs.technion.ac.il/eng/index.html (Itai & Wintner, 2008). Three words were missing from this collection and were assigned frequencies of zero.

⁵ For 50%-recall triads (i.e., those where respondents recalled one of the two words), the differentiation was weak (14% and 18% for “no” and “yes,” respectively).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation under [grant number 957/13].