Age-Related Differences in Strategy Knowledge Updating: Blocked Testing Produces Greater Improvements in Metacognitive Accuracy for Younger than Older Adults

ABSTRACT

Age-related differences in updating knowledge about strategy effectiveness after task experience have not been consistently found, perhaps because the magnitude of observed knowledge updating has been rather meager for both age groups. We examined whether creating homogeneous blocks of recall tests based on two strategies used at encoding (imagery and repetition) would enhance people's learning about strategy effects on recall. Younger and older adults demonstrated greater knowledge updating (as measured by questionnaire ratings of strategy effectiveness and by global judgments of performance) with blocked (versus random) testing. The benefit of blocked testing for absolute accuracy of global predictions was smaller for older than younger adults. However, individual differences in correlations of strategy effectiveness ratings and postdictions showed similar upgrades for both age groups. Older adults learn about imagery's superior effectiveness but do not accurately estimate the magnitude of its benefit, even after blocked testing.

Keywords:

• Metacognition
• Strategy
• Knowledge
• Associative learning
• Imagery.

This research was supported by Grant NIA R37 AG13148 awarded to C. Hertzog from the National Institute on Aging. Further information about the metacognition research conducted in the Hertzog lab can be found at http://psychology.gatech.edu/CHertzog.

Notes

¹The impact of noncompliance with instructed strategy use was examined by analyzing the data twice. First, the data were analyzed excluding the 10 older and three younger adult participants in the blocked testing condition that were sufficiently noncompliant to form homogeneous blocks of PA recall testing. These analyses were then compared to a second set of analyses run on the complete sample of participants. The loss of power in the reduced sample did yield minor changes in some significance tests, but substantive conclusions about KU were not altered. Because the overall pattern in the marginal means remained the same across both sets of analyses and because the inclusion of noncompliant participants would dilute rather than increase the effectiveness of blocked testing, we only report results from the complete sample.

²The analyses focused on the absolute accuracy of participants' global predictions, JOLs, and postdictions because it was more important to know in an absolute sense whether individuals were able to track the differential effectiveness of imagery and repetition at a global level across lists (as measured by the absolute accuracy of the global metamemory judgments). Experimental studies of metacognitive monitoring often assess the relative accuracy of participants' item-level JOLs. We evaluated whether participants' JOLs were able to differentiate items that would and would not be recalled as a function of strategy use (assessed with relative accuracy, as measured by gamma correlations), but do not report these data here. Contact the first author for a more complete set of results if interested.

Hertzog, C., Dunlosky, J., & Robinson, A. E. (2007). Intellectual abilities and metacognitive beliefs influence spontaneous use of effective encoding strategies. Unpublished manuscript.

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