Hindsight bias in younger and older adults: the role of access control

Abstract

Hindsight bias is the overestimation of one’s earlier knowledge about facts or one’s prediction of events after learning about the actual facts or events. The authors examined age differences in hindsight bias and their relation to visual access control. Younger and older adults recalled their numerical answers to general-knowledge questions. For half of the items, the correct judgment (CJ) was shown during recall. To indicate whether the distracting CJ was visually accessed, the authors measured fixations to the CJ. An instructional manipulation to ignore the CJ affected fixations and hindsight bias. Older adults showed stronger hindsight bias and more fixations to the task-irrelevant CJ, indicating an age-related deficit in access control. However, evidence for the effect of CJ access on hindsight bias was weak and more pronounced in younger than in older adults.

Keywords:

• aging
• hindsight bias
• inhibitory control
• eye movements
• retroactive interference

Acknowledgments

This research was part of Julia Groß’ doctoral dissertation. We thank Dominik Bruhn, Diana Kuhl, and Mona Kusch for their help with data collection and Siegmund Switala for technical assistance. We thank Miri Besken and Jane Zagorski for providing comments on a prior version of the manuscript. Parts of this research were presented at the Cognitive Aging Conference in Atlanta in April 2012. Support was provided by Grant BA 3539/4-1 from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Notes

1. Some of the questions came from a large item pool that was made available to us, whereas some of the questions were newly created for the present study. We thank Rüdiger Pohl for making his item pool available. The original German items and their English translations are available from the corresponding author upon request.