Yeung (2022)

Stability and consistency of metamemory judgments within a session

Frontiers in Psychology, 13

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Abstract

There has been much interest in assessing individual and group differences in metamemory skills. These endeavors require or would benefit from enhanced knowledge about the stability and consistency of metamemory judgments over successive trials. However, few studies have examined these aspects. Thus, the present study investigated and compared the within-session stability and consistency of three major types of metamemory judgment: judgment of learning (JOL), feeling-of-knowing judgment (FOK), and retrospective confidence judgment (RCJ), using a single-task paradigm. A total of 38 healthy young adults (17 males, 21 females) completed three trials of a face–scene associative learning task designed to assess metamemory. In each trial, participants rated their JOLs while studying a new set of face–scene pairs, and then rated their FOKs and RCJs while their memory was being tested. The stability and consistency of the mean confidence ratings and the relationships between confidence rating and memory performance, indexed by two gamma estimates, were analyzed and compared across types of metamemory judgments. Over trials, there was a significant decrease in the mean rating for JOL but not for FOK or RCJ. Also, the gamma scores of JOL, but not that of FOK or RCJ, significantly improved with practice. Furthermore, for each type of metamemory judgment, the mean confidence rating showed excellent consistency across trials. Depending on the judgment type and gamma estimation method, the consistency of gamma scores ranged from poor to excellent. Thus, the present study clarified the temporal dynamics of various types of metamemory judgments and the consistency of metamemory measures.

Reference

Yeung, M. K. (2022). Stability and consistency of metamemory judgments within a session. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.917576

What Rests on This

1 mechanism cites this source. Each finding below is quoted as it appears on that mechanism's own page.

Feeling of Knowing Metacognition

Measured in humans

In 38 young adults rating FOK for all items of a face–scene task before three-choice recognition, usual gamma was 0.28 to 0.38 (SD 0.42 to 0.51) across three trials, but ROC-based gamma was only 0.14 to 0.26 (SD 0.30 to 0.38), equivalent to an area under the ROC curve of about 0.57 to 0.63
Measured in AI

The scale conversion itself is published (gamma = 2 × area − 1), and one human FOK study reports the ROC-based value: 0.14 to 0.26 against the best model's 0.34, inside the human spread; this is not used, because the tests measure different judgments and the direction of any advantage is unclear (the models were told not to attempt retrieval, which supplies the partial information human FOK relies on, but were also not restricted to unrecalled items)