The accuracy of meta-metacognitive judgments: regulating the realism of confidence

Abstract

Can people improve the realism of their confidence judgments about the correctness of their episodic memory reports by deselecting the least realistic judgments? An assumption of Koriat and Goldsmith's (Psychol Rev 103:490-517, 1996) model is that confidence judgments regulate the reporting of memory reports. We tested whether this assumption generalizes to the regulation of the realism (accuracy) of confidence judgments. In two experiments, 270 adults in separate conditions answered 50 recognition and recall questions about the contents of a just-seen video. After each answer, they made confidence judgments about the answer's correctness. In Experiment 1, the participants in the recognition conditions significantly increased their absolute bias when they excluded 15 questions. In Experiment 2, the participants in the recall condition significantly improved their calibration. The results indicate that recall, more than recognition, offers valid cues for participants to increase the realism of their report. However, the effects were small with only weak support for the conclusion that people have some ability to regulate the realism in their confidence judgments.

Unskilled but subjectively aware: Metacognitive monitoring ability and respective awareness in low-performing students

“…If this applies, students' high confidence in false alarms, although unfavorable from a self-regulated learning perspective, can be explained from a motivational perspective. Third, students' performance judgments and their SOJs might not really differ (an assumption discussed by Buratti & Allwood, 2012). That is, if students state that they have solved an item correctly, they confirm the statement with their SOJ.…”

“…To that end, local judgments were analyzed with reference to the classification system of signal detection theory. Until now, previous research on local (second-order) judgments had used confidence scales rather than dichotomous items for performance judgments (Buratti & Allwood, 2012;Dunlosky et al, 2005). This made it impossible to categorize performance judgments according to signal detection theory.…”

“…Nevertheless, because SOJs are not directly linked to performance in a domain but to metacognitive monitoring ability, they are regarded as a valid indicator for assessing metacognitive awareness. When asked for SOJs, students likely feel compelled to take a critical stance and to reflect on behavioral consequences, such as engaging in learning activities to fill knowledge gaps (Buratti & Allwood, 2012;Metcalfe, 1998). Indeed, making an SOJ might be similar to the second stage of the two-stage process discussed for delayed judgments of learning (cf.…”

“…In addition, the authors asked for second-order judgments (SOJs) to assess the students' awareness of their metacognitive monitoring ability. SOJs are confidence judgments for previously given performance judgments (Dunlosky, Serra, Matvey, & Rawson, 2005) and can be regarded as meta-monitoring (Dunlosky et al, 2005) or meta-metacognitive judgments (Buratti & Allwood, 2012). Confirming the results by Kruger and Dunning (1999), Miller and Geraci found that low-performing students' performance judgments were too high in comparison with their actual performance.…”

Initial Testing Does Not Necessarily Affect Eyewitness Recall Assessed by Specific Questioning

“…We were also interested in determining whether performance in the final memory test is determined by how well the processing requirements of the final memory test matched a prior testing phase (Morris, Bransford, & Franks, ). In addition, for each question in the final memory task, we asked for confidence judgements, because response confidence can indicate whether participants are able to phenomenologically distinguish accurate from inaccurate answers (Buratti & Allwood, ; Deffenbacher, ). In eyewitness memory research, it has been observed that confident witnesses are not necessarily accurate witnesses, as they can pick the wrong person in a police line‐up (e.g.…”