Memory, metamemory, and social cues: Between conformity and resistance.

Abstract

When presented with responses of another person, people incorporate these responses into memory reports: a finding termed memory conformity. Research on memory conformity in recognition reveals that people rely on external social cues to guide their memory responses when their own ability to respond is at chance. In this way, conforming to a reliable source boosts recognition performance but conforming to a random source does not impair it. In the present study we assessed whether people would conform indiscriminately to reliable and unreliable (random) sources when they are given the opportunity to exercise metamemory control over their responding by withholding answers in a recognition test. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found the pattern of memory conformity to reliable and unreliable sources in two variants of a free-report recognition test, yet at the same time the provision of external cues did not affect the rate of response withholding. In Experiment 3, we provided participants with initial feedback on their recognition decisions, facilitating the discrimination between the reliable and unreliable source. This led to the reduction of memory conformity to the unreliable source, and at the same time modulated metamemory decisions concerning response withholding: participants displayed metamemory conformity to the reliable source, volunteering more responses in their memory report, and metamemory resistance to the random source, withholding more responses from the memory report. Together, the results show how metamemory decisions dissociate various types of memory conformity and that memory and metamemory decisions can be independent of each other. Keywords: Memory conformity, Metamemory, Recognition MEMORY, METAMEMORY, AND SOCIAL CUES 3Memory, metamemory, and social cues: Between conformity and resistance Remembering has long been considered exclusively as a process of encoding, storing and retrieving information from one's memory. This perspective neglects, however, a variety of factors that affect remembering yet do not concern the core memory processes. Two instances of such extra-memorial factors in remembering gained much attention in recent years. First, the social perspective underscores the fact that remembering often does not unfold in social isolation, but rather in the presence and with active participation of other people (Blank, 2009;Hirst & Echterhoff, 2012;Hirst & Rajaram, 2014; Rajaram & PereiraPasarin, 2010). A number of important studies have shown how collaborating with other people affects remembering, often in negative ways, reducing output from memory (Basden, Basden, Bryner, & Thomas, 1997) or introducing errors (Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2003;Meade & Roediger, 2002). Second, the metamemory perspective underscores the fact that the process of remembering does not stop when memory is retrieved but continues in the form of metamemory decisions which determine how information retrieved from memory will be used to build a memory report -that is, the overt answer provided to a memory ...

Conformity Scores Differentiate Older Hemodialyzed Patients and Patients with Continuous Peritoneal Dialysis

“…Its test items are general and they do not need to be modified to conduct testing in any targeted population, making this test very robust and age-neutral [15]. Conformity is a notoriously difficult subject to study because it is not an overt psychological process; instead, its presentation and influence are subconscious in nature [7,8,10]. During a pilot study, it was suggested that we use alternative psychological tools to measure the degree of conformity.…”

“…It has been studied for a long time [7–11]. Conformity may be either an unconscious influence or a direct pressure on the person to adopt certain values cherished by society or an attending physician.…”

“…Otherwise, an individual risks rejection, which is a source of stress [10]. It is not surprising that there is a high level of pressure on patients to conform to the expectation of the medical personnel during dialysis [2,4,7,9,11]. After all, members of the medical staff are the gatekeepers of a life-saving therapy.…”

Confidence in forced-choice recognition: What underlies the ratings?

“…But our recent line of investigation into how recognition memory is shaped by social cues demonstrates clearly that factors affecting performance may be discounted when making confidence judgments. Krogulska, Zawadzka, and Hanczakowski (2016) showed that in a memory conformity paradigm in which by and large accurate social cues are provided (see Jaeger, Lauris, Selmeczy, & Dobbins, 2012), participants incorporate these cues into their recognition decisions, enhancing their recognition performance, but they do not incorporate these cues into their confidence judgments, which results in another confidence--accuracy dissociation, one in which confidence does not track changes in accuracy (see Zawadzka, Krogulska, Button, Higham, & Hanczakowski, 2016, for related findings). This last dissociation arises because recognition accuracy in a social context depends not only on memory but also on accurate cues provided by external sources.…”

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