Magnitude and accuracy differences between judgements of remembering and forgetting

Abstract

Metacognition researchers have recently begun to examine the effects of framing judgements of learning (JOLs) in terms of forgetting (rather than remembering) on the judgements' magnitude and accuracy. Although a promising new direction for the study of metamemory, initial studies have yielded inconsistent results. To help resolve these inconsistencies, in four experiments we had college students (N = 434) study paired associates and make JOLs framed in terms of either remembering or forgetting over two study–test trials. Our goals were to further document the effects of framing on the magnitude and accuracy of JOLs and to consider explanations for why specific patterns tend to emerge. The present experiments provide evidence that (a) judgements of forgetting are psychologically anchored at the midpoint of the JOL scale, whereas judgements of remembering are anchored at a lower point, (b) differences in absolute accuracy (calibration) by frame are largely artefactual and stem from differences in anchoring, (c) differences in JOL magnitude and absolute accuracy by frame do not obtain when memory cues are salient to participants, and (d) a forget frame impairs the relative accuracy (resolution) of JOLs across trials by reducing participants' reliance on cues such as memory for past test performance.

Keywords:

• Metacognition
• Metamemory
• Judgements of learning
• Accuracy
• Framing

Acknowledgments

We presented some of these studies at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association and the 50th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. We thank John Dunlosky, Sarah K. Tauber, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and feedback on this research.

Notes

¹ We did not have a reason to directly compare the two types of JOL (immediate vs. delayed) to each other, so we conducted all analyses separately for immediate and delayed JOLs rather than analysing the type of JOL as an independent variable. Interested readers, however, can safely make comparisons across the type of JOL if they choose to. Towards this end, Rhodes and Tauber (2011) included data from the remember-framed immediate- and delayed-JOL groups in Experiment 1 in their meta-analysis of delayed JOLs.

² One potential criticism of forget-frame JOLs is that people might be confused about how to make these judgements and use the scale “backwards”. These positive relative-accuracy correlations (especially those for delayed JOLs), however, suggest that people can make forget-frame JOLs correctly, and can do with considerable accuracy in some situations.

³ Although such “metacognition about metacognition” has not received much empirical study in the cognitive-psychology literature, it has been considered in greater depth in the social-psychology literature (albeit in a less direct way, e.g., Briñol, Petty, & Tormala, 2006; McCaslin, Petty, & Wegener, 2010). Furthermore, prominent cognitive conceptualizations of metacognition (i.e., Nelson & Narens, 1994) concede the likelihood of “meta-metacognition” and stress that such thinking is in fact no different from any other metacognition, as it is simply another form of “thought about thought”.

⁴ Note that although the reverse scoring of the forget-framed JOLs might have produced a “flipped” SOJ–JOL pattern for these JOLs, the two halves of Figure 7 do not seem to be mirror images of each other.