METACOGNITION ABOUT MEMORY

Metacognition about memory, sometimes called metamemory, refers to the self-monitoring and self-control of one's own memory in the acquisition and retrieval of information. It is a relatively new topic, having been investigated by psychologists for approximately forty years. Before then, researchers viewed learners as passive, as blank slates onto which new ideas were etched through repetition. By contrast, subsequent researchers viewed the learner as an active controller of his or her learning, whether acquiring new or retrieving old information. Moreover, researchers now know that people can monitor their progress during both learning and retrieval.

For example, imagine a student who is studying for an examination that will occur tomorrow in French class, say on French-English vocabulary such as " chateau/castle" and " rouge/red." Let us keep that student in mind as we consider the monitoring and the control of the student's learning of the new vocabulary and his or her attempts to retrieve the answers during the test the next day.

A theoretical framework that integrates all of these processes into an overall system can be found in Nelson and Narens (1990).

Different kinds of monitoring processes can be distinguished in terms of when they occur in the learning/retrieval sequence and whether they pertain to the person's future performance (in which case the focus is said to be on prospective monitoring) or to the person's past performance (in which case the focus is said to be on retrospective monitoring).

Prospective Monitoring

Ease-of-Learning Judgment

The first metamemory judgment made by someone who is getting ready to learn new information occurs before learning begins. This ease-of-learning judgment is the person's evaluation of how easy or difficult the items will be to learn. For instance, the person might believe that the overall set of items will take a given amount of time to learn and that chateau/castle will be more difficult to learn that rouge/red. Underwood (1966) first showed that people are moderately accurate—not perfectly accurate but well above chance—at predicting which items will be easiest or hardest to learn. People's predictions of how easy it will be to learn each item, made in advance of learning, are moderately correlated (i.e., covaried) with their subsequent recall after a constant amount of study time on every item.

Judgments of Learning

The next kind of monitoring occurs during and/or at the end of learning. The person's judgment of learning is the evaluation of how well he or she has learned a given item; it is a prediction of the likelihood that the item will be recalled correctly on a future test. The psychologists Arbuckle and Cuddy (1969) first showed that the predictive accuracy of people's judgment of learning is above chance but far from perfect, like ease-of-learning judgments. Research by Leonesio and Nelson (1990) has shown, hwoever, that judgments of learning are more accurate than ease-of-learning judgments for predicting eventual recall; this is probably because the judgments of learning—but not ease-of-learning judgments—can be based in part on what the learner notices about how well he or she is mastering the items during learning.

Research by Nelson and Dunlosky (1991) showed a case in which judgments of learning are especially accurate: when they are made after a filled delay of at least thirty seconds following the offset of study of an item. This phenomenon, in which the accuracy of judgment of learning in predicting future recall is nearly perfect, is known as the delayed JOL effect.

Feeling-of-Knowing Judgments

These judgments are people's prediction of whether they will eventually remember an answer that they do not now recall. This was the first kind of metamemory judgment to be examined in the laboratory. The pioneering researcher, Hart (1965), found that these feeling-of-knowing judgments were somewhat accurate in predicting subsequent memory performance. The subsequent likelihood of correctly recognizing a nonrecalled answer was higher for nonrecalled items that people said were stored in their memory than for those reported as not stored in memory. However, as in the case of other metamemory judgments, the accuracy of this judgment was far from perfect; people often did not recognize answers they had claimed they would recognize, and they sometimes recognized those they thought they would not. The accuracy of predicting other kinds of memory performance (e.g., ease of relearning) on nonrecalled items was subsequently reviewed and investigated by Nelson, Gerler, and Narens (1984), who also offered several theoretical explanations for how people might make their feeling-of-knowing judgments.

Retrospective Confidence Judgments

In contrast to attempts by people to predict their future memory performance, retrospective confidence judgments occur after the venturing of the answer —whether correct or incorrect—and pertain to degrees of confidence in the correctness of the answer. For instance, if our hypothetical student were asked to recall the English equivalent of chateau, the person might say "castle" (correct answer) or might say "red" (incorrect answer); then he or she would make a confidence judgment about the likelihood that the recalled answer was correct. Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein (1977) found that retrospective confidence judgments were substantially accurate but often marred by overconfidence. For instance, for those items to which people had given a confidence judgment of "80 percent likely to be correct," the actual percentage of correct recognition was much lower than 80 percent.

This overconfidence occurs primarily for confidence judgments made for individual items. Confidence judgments can also be made for a list of items (e.g., "How many of the fifty items on the test did you recall correctly?"), which is labeled an aggregate confidence judgment. Griffin and Tversky (1992) reported that aggregate confidence judgments are usually less overconfident (and sometimes even underconfident), a phenomenon known as the aggregation effect.

Control

Not only can people monitor their progress during learning and retrieval, but they can also control many aspects of their learning and retrieval. First, we will consider aspects they can control during self-paced learning, and then we will consider aspects they can control during retrieval.

Control During Self-Paced Learning

Allocation of Self-Paced Study Time During Learning.

Our hypothetical student who is learning foreign-language vocabulary can choose to allocate large or small amounts of study time to each item and subsequently can allocate extra study time to some items. Moreover, as shown by Bisanz, Vesonder, and Voss (1978), the allocation of study time may be made in conjunction with the judgments of learning described above. In an investigation of learners of various ages, Bisanz and colleagues discovered that learners in the early years of primary school might make accurate judgments of learning but would not use those judgments when allocating additional study time across the items, whereas slightly older children would use those judgments when allocating additional study time. In particular, the older children allocated extra study time to items that they believed they had learned but not to those that they believed they had not learned. By contrast, the younger children were not systematic in allocating extra study time primarily to unlearned items.

Even adults do not always allocate more study time to more difficult items. Son and Metcalfe (2000) have shown that when there is insufficient time to study all items, subjects may allocate the most study time to easier items. For instance, if our hypothetical student judged his or her learning to be greater for rouge/red than for chateau/castle, then, if he or she had unlimited study time, that knowledge should result in extra study time for it than for rouge/red. If study time were limited, the student might allocate more time to chateau/castle than to rouge/red, perhaps reasoning that this strategy would enhance performance, though Son and Metcalfe's (2000) research shows no evidence that this strategy aids test performance.

Strategy Employed During Self-Paced Study.

Not only can people control how much study time they allocate to various items (as discussed in the previous paragraph), but they can also control which strategy they employ during that study time. For many kinds of learning, there are strategies that are more effective than rote repetition. For instance, a mnemonic strategy for learning foreign-language vocabulary was investigated by Pressley, Levin, and Ghatala (1984). After people had learned some foreign-language vocabulary by rote and other foreign-language vocabulary by the mnemonic strategy, they were given a choice of using whichever strategy they wanted for a final trial of learning some additional foreign-language vocabulary. Only 12 percent of adults chose the mnemonic strategy if they had not received any test trial during the earlier learning phase, whereas 87 percent chose the mnemonic strategy if they had received test trials during the earlier learning phase. Apparently, people should have test trials to help them realize the effectiveness of different strategies for learning. Moreover, getting children to adopt the mnemonic strategy spontaneously required test trials during the earlier learning phase. The children also needed to have feedback after those test trials to tell them how well they had done on the rote-learned items versus the mnemonic-learned items.

Control During Retrieval

Control of Initiating One's Retrieval.

Immediately after a questions is posed, before someone memory for the answer, he or she makes a metamemory decision about whether the answer is likely to be found in memory. For instance, if you were asked the telephone number of the president of the United States, you probably would decide immediately that the answer is not in your memory. Notice that you do not need to search through all the telephone numbers that you know, nor do you need to search through all the information you have stored in your memory about the president. You probably realize that the president does have a telephone number, but you know you don't know it, and therefore you don't initiate attempts to retrieve that answer. Consider how different that situation is from one in which you are asked the telephone number of one of your friends.

This initial feeling-of-knowing judgment that precedes an attempt to retrieve an answer was investigated by Reder (1987). She found that people were faster at making a feeling-of-knowing decision about whether they knew the answer to a general-information question (e.g., "What is the capital of Finland?") than they were at answering the question (e.g., saying "Helsinki"). This finding demonstrates that the metamemory decision is made before, not after, the retrieval of the answer. If and only if people feel that they know the answer will they initiate attempts to retrieve the answer from memory. When they feel that they do not know the answer, they don't even attempt to search memory (as in the example of the president's telephone number).

Control of the Termination of Extended Attempts at Retrieval.

People may initially feel strongly enough that they know an answer to begin searching memory for it, but after fruitless extended attempts at retrieval, they will terminate the search. Nelson, Gerler, and Narens (1984) found that people would search longer for a sought-but-not-retrieved answer if they felt strongly that they knew the answer. Put differently, the amount of time that elapses before someone gives up searching memory for a nonretrieved answer tends to increase with the degree of the feeling that the person knows the answer.

For example, our hypothetical student mentioned above might spend a long time during the examination attempting to retrieve the English equivalent of chateau (which the person had studied the night before) but little or no time attempting to retrieve the English equivalent of cheval (which the person did not study previously). The metamemory decision to continue or terminate attempts at retrieving an answer from memory may also be affected by other factors, such as the total amount of time available during an examination.

Bibliography

Arbuckle, T. Y., and Cuddy, L. L. (1969). Discrimination of item strength at time of presentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology 81, 126-131.

Bisanz, G. L., Vesonder, G. T., and Voss, J. F. (1978). Knowledge of one's own responding and the relation of such knowledge to learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 25, 116-128.

Fischhoff, B., Slovic, P., and Lichtenstein, S. (1977). Knowing with certainty: The appropriateness of extreme confidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 3, 552-564.

Griffin, D., and Tversky, A. (1992). The weighing of evidence and the determinants of confidence. Cognitive Psychology 24, 411-435.

Hart, J. T. (1965). Memory and the feeling-of-knowing experience. Journal of Educational Psychology 56, 208-216.

Leonesio, R. J., and Nelson T. O. (1990). Do different measures of metamemory tap the same underlying aspects of memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16, 464-470.

Nelson, T. O., and Dunlosky, J. (1991). When people's judgments of learning (JOLs) are extremely accurate at predicting subsequent recall: The "Delayed-JOL Effect." Psychological Science 2, 267-270.

Nelson, T. O., Gerler, D., and Narens, L. (1984). Accuracy of feeling-of-knowing judgment for predicting perceptual identification and relearning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113, 282-300.

Nelson, T. O., and Narens, L. (1984). Metamemory: A theoretical framework and some new findings. In G. H. Bower, ed., The psychology of learning and motivation. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Pressley, M., Levin, J. R., and Ghatala, E. (1984). Memory strategy monitoring in adults and children. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 23, 270-288.

Reder, L. M. (1987). Strategy selection in question answering. Cognitive Psychology 19, 90-138.

Son, L. K., and Metcalfe, J. (2000). Metacognitive and control strategies in study-time allocation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning: Memory and Cognition 26, 204-221.

Underwood, B. J. (1966). Individual and group predictions of item difficulty for free learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, 673-679.

Thomas O.Nelson

Revised byThomas O.Nelson

andPetraScheck