Recent research suggests that human memory systems evolved to remember animate things better than inanimate things. In the present experiments, we examined whether these effects occur for both free recall and cued recall. In Experiment 1, we directly compared the effect of animacy on free recall and cued recall. Participants studied lists of objects and lists of animals for free-recall tests, and studied sets of animal-animal pairs and object-object pairs for cued-recall tests. In Experiment 2, we compared participants' cued recall for English-English, Swahili-English, and English-Swahili word pairs involving either animal or object English words. In Experiment 3, we compared participants' cued recall for animal-animal, object-object, animal-object, and object-animal pairs. Although we were able to replicate past effects of animacy aiding free recall, animacy typically impaired cued recall in the present experiments. More importantly, given the interactions found in the present experiments, we conclude that some factor associated with animacy (e.g., attention capture or mental arousal) is responsible for the present patterns of results. This factor seems to moderate the relationship between animacy and memory, producing a memory advantage for animate stimuli in scenarios where the moderator leads to enhanced target retrievability but a memory disadvantage for animate stimuli in scenarios where the moderator leads to impaired association memory.

In two experiments we systematically explored whether people consider the format of text materials when judging their text learning, and whether doing so might inappropriately bias their judgements. Participants studied either text with diagrams (multimedia) or text alone and made both per-paragraph judgements and global judgements of their text learning. In Experiment 1 they judged their learning to be better for text with diagrams than for text alone. In that study, however, test performance was greater for multimedia, so the judgements may reflect either a belief in the power of multimedia or on-line processing. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and also included a third group that read texts with pictures that did not improve text performance. Judgements made by this group were just as high as those made by participants who received the effective multimedia format. These results confirm the hypothesis that people's metacomprehension judgements can be influenced by their beliefs about text format. Over-reliance on this multimedia heuristic, however, might reduce judgement accuracy in situations where it is invalid.

Judgments of learning (JOLs) made during multiple study-test trials underestimate increases in recall performance across those trials, an effect that has been dubbed the underconfidence-with-practice (UWP) effect. In 3 experiments, the authors examined the contribution of retrieval fluency to the UWP effect for immediate and delayed JOLs. The UWP effect was demonstrated with reliable underconfidence on Trial 2 occurring for both kinds of JOL. However, in contrast to a retrieval-fluency hypothesis, fine-grained analyses indicated that the reliance of JOLs on retrieval fluency contributed minimally to the UWP effect. Our discussion focuses on the status of the retrieval-fluency hypothesis for the UWP effect.

People tend to be overconfident when predicting their performance on a variety of physical and mental tasks (i.e., they predict they will perform better than they actually do). Such a pattern is commonly found in educational settings, in which many students greatly overestimate how well they will perform on exams. In particular, the lowest-performing students tend to show the greatest overconfidence (i.e., the Bunskilled-and-unaware^effect). Such overconfidence can have deleterious effects on the efficacy of students' shortterm study behaviors (i.e., underpreparing for exams) and long-term academic decisions (i.e., changing one's academic major to an Beasier^topic or dropping out of school completely). To help understand why students' grade predictions are often overconfident, we examined the hypothesis that students' grade predictions are biased by their desired levels of performance, which are often much higher than their actual levels of performance. Across three studies in which actual students made predictions about their exam performance in their courses, we demonstrated that students' grade predictions are highly biased by their desired grades on those exams. We obtained this result when students predicted their exam grades over a week before the exam (Study 1), immediately after taking the exam (Study 2), and across the four course exams in a single semester (Study 3). These results are informative for understanding why the Bunskilled-and-unawarep attern of performance predictions occurs, and why people in general tend to be overconfident when making both physical and mental performance predictions.

ABSTRACT. The authors explored the relations between predictions of the likelihood of recalling studied items (called judgments of learning, or JOLs) and second-order judgments (SOJs), in which one rates confidence in the accuracy of each JOL. Each participant studied paired-associate items and made JOLs. A given JOL was either immediate or delayed and was followed immediately by an SOJ. After all items were studied and judged, paired-associate recall occurred. The incorporation of SOJs into this standard method yielded numerous outcomes relevant to theory of metacognitive judgments. SOJs were greater for extreme JOLs (0, 100) than for intermediate JOLs (40, 50). Also, JOL accuracy was greater for delayed than for immediate JOLs, and, reflecting this delayed-JOL effect, SOJs were greater for delayed than for immediate JOLs. These and other outcomes support 2-process hypotheses of how people make JOLs and uncover some pitfalls in interpreting poor judgment accuracy.Key words: judgments of learning, metacognition, metamemory, second-order judgments IN THIS ARTICLE, we offer an advance for metacognitive research by introducing second-order judgments (SOJs), which provide a new perspective for exploring the processes and accuracy of metacognitive judgments in general and judgments of learning in particular. Judgments of learning (JOLs) are a person's predictions about the likelihood of correctly retrieving recently studied items on an upcoming test. These judgments have become one of the most intensely investigated of the metacognitive judgments (Koriat, 1997;Schwartz, 1994), partly because making them accurately can support the effective regulation of self-paced study (Thiede, 1999). Second-order judgments (SOJs) pertain to an individual's confidence in the JOLs themselves and have not yet been investigated in the lit-