title: Improving metacognitive accuracy: how failing to retrieve practice items reduces overconfidence.
abstract: People often exhibit inaccurate metacognitive monitoring. For example, overconfidence occurs when people judge that they will remember more information on a future test then they actually do. The present experiments examined whether a small number of retrieval practice opportunities would improve participants' metacognitive accuracy by reducing overconfidence. Participants studied Lithuanian-English paired associates and predicted their performance on an upcoming memory test. Then they attempted to retrieve one or more practice items (or none in the control condition) and made a second prediction. Experiment 1 showed that failing to retrieve a single practice item lead to improved subsequent performance predictions - participants became less overconfident. Experiment 2 directly manipulated retrieval failure and showed that again failure to retrieve a single practice item significantly improved subsequent predictions, relative to when participants successfully retrieved the practice item. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that additional retrieval practice opportunities reduced overconfidence and improved prediction accuracy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, South Dakota State University, United States. Electronic address: tyler.miller@sdstate.edu.
authors.forename: Tyler M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, United States.
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Geraci
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D012647:Self-Assessment; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Metacognition; Overconfidence; Retrieval practice