The effect of timing and stimulus properties on metacognitive judgments

Abstract

The present thesis tested the effect of partial information along with the effect of timing on feeling of knowing (FOK) judgments to provide a comprehensive account of variables influencing FOK strength and accuracy. In the present study, partial information was conceptualized based on Koriat (1994)’s argument such that partial information is something that comes to mind in thinking about the target and is the ‘glimpse’ of the information related to the target. To manipulate levels of partial information available at retrieval, we used a cued recall task and paired medium frequency words with words that either had large or small association sets and weak or strong primary associates, respectively. Moreover, we also manipulated whether FOK judgments were given under time constraints or in a self-paced fashion. We conducted three successive experiments. Most critically we found that people’s FOK judgments were affected by both timing and level of partial information manipulations. In particular, participants gave higher FOK judgments for correctly recalled trials when they had enough time to evaluate their judgments regardless of the association level of the words. However, for incorrectly recalled items higher judgments were given for the targets with strong levels of association and in the self-paced time conditions. Results of FOK accuracy did not differ across timing manipulation and word type. These findings suggest that both strong level of partial information of a given word and self-paced timing for making a FOK judgment increases FOK judgment magnitude.