Age-related differences in metacognition for memory capacity and selectivity

ABSTRACT

Background: We compared two types of metacognitive monitoring in younger and older adults: metacognitive accuracy for their overall memory performance and their ability to selectively remember high-value information. Method: Participants studied words paired with point values and were asked to maximise their point score. In Experiment 1, they predicted how many words they would remember while in Experiment 2, they predicted how many points they would earn. Results: In Experiment 1, while younger adults were accurate in their predictions, older adults were overconfident in the number of words they would recall throughout the task. In Experiment 2, however, both younger and older adults were equally accurate when predicting the amount of points they would earn after some task experience. Conclusions: While younger adults may have higher metacognitive accuracy for their capacity, older adults can accurately assess their ability to selectively remember information, suggesting potentially separate metacognitive mechanisms that are differentially affected by aging.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• metacognition
• predictions
• selectivity
• value-directed remembering

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Adam Blake, Brandon Carone, Mary Hargis, Tyson Kerr, Catherine Middlebrooks, and the rest of the members of the Memory and Lifespan Cognition Laboratory at UCLA for their guidance and support throughout this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Alexander L.M. Siegel & Alan D. Castel, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles.

ORCID

Alexander L. M. Siegel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5199-4461

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Aging; Award Number R01 AG044335 to Alan Castel). Portions of this work were presented at the 2018 Cognitive Aging Conference in Atlanta, GA and the UCLA Research Conference on Aging in Los Angeles, CA.