The relation between level of general knowledge and feeling‐of‐knowing: An adult age study

Abstract

Backman, L. & Karlsson, T. The relation between level of general knowledge and feelingof-knowing: An adult age study. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 1985, 26, 249-258.Younger and older adults were examined in recall and recognition of factual information varying in datedness. It was found that younger adults performed better for questions related to the time period 1970-1983, while the older adults performed better for questions related to the time period 1930-1950. The subjects also did confidence ratings of their "feeling-of-knowing" of the actual questions. On the basis of the cross-over interaction between age and datedness, the relationship between the level of general knowledge and the ability to monitor the knowledge was investigated. Only minor differences were observed between the graphs describing recall and recognition performance as a function of feeling-of-knowing in the four age by datedness combinations. Thus, the results suggest that the ability to supervise context-free semantic information may be intact despite an inferiority in level of knowledge. Comparisons were made between the results of the present study and those of previous studies on metamemory and episodic remembering.

Diminished episodic memory awareness in older adults: Evidence from feeling-of-knowing and recollection

“…The finding that an age-linked change may appear on a FOK task where episodic memory is involved, but not semantic memory, demonstrates, at least in certain conditions, that metamemory monitoring is affected by aging. As a whole, our results are consistent with previous studies where aging effects on Episodic FOK and Semantic FOK accuracy were analyzed in separate experiments (Allen-Burge & Storandt, 2000;Bäckman & Karlsson, 1985;Butterfield et al, 1988;Lachman et al, 1979;Marquie & Huet, 2000;Souchay et al, 2000). To recapitulate, the fact that age affects only the FOK for an episodic memory task and not a semantic task suggests that these may be functionally different.…”

“…There are several studies of FOK and aging, a typical finding being that younger and older adults do not differ in their ability to predict which items they will be able to recognise at least for semantic memory information (Allen-Burge & Storandt, 2000;Bäckman & Karlsson, 1985;Butterfield, Nelson, & Peck, 1988;Lachman, Lachman, & Thronesbery, 1979;Marquie & Huet, 2000). However, using an Episodic FOK metamemory task, Souchay et al (2000) found a significant age effect on FOK accuracy for recently learned episodic information.…”

Memory complaints and test performance in healthy elderly persons

“…The fact that SMC in the elderly was related to a worse performance on RAVLT in our study suggests accuracy in metamemory, something that has been previously reported 26,27 . Wang et al 7 studied the relationship between SMC, depression and cognitive performance in a predominantly illiterate population and demonstrated that even when age, sex and education were controlled, there was a relationship between SMC and worse performance in tests.…”

Recognition memory across the adult life span: The role of prior knowledge

“…The subjects' prior knowledge of the experimental materials was determined on the basis of normative data from previous research Backman & Karlsson, 1985), in which it was demonstrated that young adults had more knowledge of people famous today than of people famous during the 19305 and 1940s, whereas the reverse was true for different groups of older adults (see also Hultsch & Dixon, 1983;Perlmutter, Metzger, Miller, & Nezworski, 1980). Note that the results from some of these normative studies (Backman & Karlsson, 1985;Perlmutter et aI., 1980) indicated that older adults have more knowledge of dated famous persons than of contemporary famous persons and that the opposite applies to young adults, whereas the results from other studies Hultsch & Dixon, 1983) suggest that the representations may also be richer and more elaborate for cohort-relevant famous persons. In the present experiment, both the dated and the contemporary materials comprised 12 individuals from each of five domains: politics, literature, music, movies, and sports.…”

“…The young subjects had completed an average of 12.73 years offorma1 education (SD = 1.68, range = 10-15 years); the younger old subjects averaged 13.00 years of schooling (SD = 1.66, range = 9-16 years); the 76-year-old subjects had a mean educational background of 12.27 years (SD = 2.22, range = 8-15 years); and the 85-year-old subjects averaged 10.00 years of schooling (SD = 1.66, range = 7-13 years). Karlsson, 1985), in which it was demonstrated that young adults had more knowledge of people famous today than of people famous during the 19305 and 1940s, whereas the reverse was true for different groups of older adults (see also Hultsch & Dixon, 1983;Perlmutter, Metzger, Miller, & Nezworski, 1980). Note that the results from some of these normative studies (Backman & Karlsson, 1985; Perlmutter et aI., 1980) indicated that older adults have more knowledge of dated famous persons than of contemporary famous persons and that the opposite applies to young adults, whereas the results from other studies (Backman & Hultsch & Dixon, 1983) suggest that the representations may also be richer and more elaborate for cohort-relevant famous persons.…”