title: Easily perceived, easily remembered? Perceptual interference produces a double dissociation between metamemory and memory performance.
abstract: A recent candidate for explaining metamemory judgments is the perceptual fluency hypothesis, which proposes that easily perceived items are predicted to be remembered better, regardless of actual memory performance (Rhodes & Castel Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 137:615-625, 2008). In two experiments, we used the perceptual interference manipulation to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with intact and backward-masked words during encoding, followed by a metamemory prediction (a list-wide judgment of learning, JOL) and then a free recall test. Participants predicted that intact words would be better recalled, despite better actual memory for words in the perceptual interference condition, yielding a crossed double dissociation between predicted and actual memory performance. In Experiment 2, JOLs were made after each study word. Item-by-item JOLs were likewise higher for intact than for backward-masked words, despite similar actual memory performance for both types of words. The results are consistent with the perceptual fluency hypothesis of metamemory and are discussed in terms of experience-based and theory-based metamemory judgments.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Davie Hall CB#3270, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270, USA. mbesken@gmail.com
authors: Miri
authors: M
authors: Besken
authors: Neil W
authors: NW
authors: Mulligan
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult