Metamemory

Metamemory

1. Higher order cognitive processes involved in memory function, encapsulating beliefs, attitudes, sensations and knowledge about memory function

   • Such knowledge enables you to maximise memory performance by
     • Selecting processing tasks
     • Deciding to stop or continue studying new material
     • Deciding to continue to search memory for an item that has not yet been activated

2. Includes the ability to monitor one's own memory performance

   • Knowledge of our individual memory skill
   • Assessment of how well we know or understand new info/knowledge
   • Predictions about future memory performance

3. Judgements of Learning (JOL)

   • Are people's estimates of how well they have learned something: they involve monitoring the quality of encoding before taking a memory test, and making explicit predictions about performance
   • Typically reasonably accurate estimates of performance
   • However, when you make a JOL is important, delayed JOLs are more accurate than immediate JOLs
     • This effect is thought to reflect the fact that delayed JOLs are based on accessibility of material in LTM, whereas immediate JOLs also include access to info still held in STM
   • Based on our metamemory knowledge, we can decide whether to produce a response during recall, and make judgements re: the likelihood that an answer is correct
     • Metamemory is used to modify processing
   • If you make a high estimate of JOL, you will study an item less than if you predict a low JOL score
     • Unfortunately we tend to underestimate the amount of study time required for items with low JOL predictions
   • JOLs are also influenced by whether you are estimating total or partial knowledge
   • JOLs for scores on tests are influenced by the foresight bias
     • Over estimation of the number of correct answers on future tests
   • JOLs for the number of items remembered vs forgotten are more accurate
   • Lovelace presented participants with pairs of unrelated words and advised them that they'd be tested on their paired-associate learning
     • Participants were presented with the first item in a pair and asked to estimate the likelihood they would recall the associate
     • When rating was 1, participants were correct 45% of the time, when rating was 5, participants were correct 80% of the time

4. Metamemory and ADHD

   • People with ADHD (4-5% of the population) have difficulty paying close attention, whether at school, at word, or at home
     • This effects memory, people with ADHD overestimate their performance on memory tests by 30% (people without ADHD overestimate by 20%)
   • Research by Knouse et al. demonstrated that although people with ADHD overestimate their overall memory performance, they do not differ from people without ADHD, when estimating their performance item by item
   • Dunning et al. demonstrated that people fail to recognise their own incompetence
     • 141 students were asked how well they did on the exam and their performance mastery of the material compared to other students
     • Students in the bottom quartile overestimated their performance by over 30%, they don't know that they don't know

5. Feeling of Knowing (FOK)

   • The capacity to predict recognition of a non-recallable item
   • Can be elicited in experimental contexts by asking general knowledge trivia questions
   • Such judgements are typically sound predictors of future memory performance, we know whether the info is in memory before we can retrieve it
   • I know not: judgements about what we don't know are consequently made accurately and very quickly

6. Tip-of-the-Tongue

   • Describes the experience involving an inability to recall a word, name, or phrase that you know you know: a selective failure of word retrieval
   • Is very closely interrelated with the FOK, and it's something we experience at least once a week
   • Typically we can recall that the word starts with a particular letter or certain sound (50-70% of the time) and give examples of words it rhymes with
   • Brown and McNeil conducted the first experimental study of the TOT phenomenon, they presented participants with the definitions of uncommon words
     • Sometimes people responded correctly immediately, or were confident they didn't know, sometimes the definitions produced a TOT state
     • Participants were asked to provide words that sounded like the target, 49% matched the target's first letter, 48% matched the number of syllables

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