Metamemory - Lecture notes for Professor Ingate\'s course. Includes powerpoint notes as well PDF

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Lecture notes for Professor Ingate's course. Includes powerpoint notes as well as any additional verbal notes....

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Metamemory ● Metacognitive control and monitoring ● Ease of learning judgments ● Judgments of learning ● Feeling of knowing judgments ● Tip of the tongue states ● Retrospective confidence judgments ● Déjà vu “Meta-” means after, beyond, behind, and has come to also mean higher (UrbanDictionary: self-referential) ● Metacognition: our knowledge and awareness of our own cognitive processes. (Research suggests that based on our metacognitive awareness, we often make sophisticated decisions about how to go about learning, remembering, and finding our way when lost.) ● Metamemory: our knowledge and awareness of our own memory processes. Individuals differ in meta-memory and metacognitive processes.(Metamemory includes the ability to both monitor one’s own memory abilities and control them. It allows human beings to reflect on their own memory processes and to actively and expertly selfregulate their memory. It may be that some animals have rudimentary metamemory processes.) Metacognitive monitoring: our ability to reflect and become aware of what we know and what we do not. (occurs whenever we take the measure of our own mental states. When we judge whether or not we think we can remember something when we feel more or less confident that we know something, and when we feel more or less confident that we have understood something, we are engaged in monitoring.) Metacognitive monitoring accuracy: the extent to which our judgments of what we know correspond to our actual state of knowledge. Metacognitive control: our ability to regulate our learning or retrieval based upon our own monitoring. Metamemory judgments: the subjective reports that people give to indicate whether they think they have learned or can retrieve a target memory For college students, when is metamemory important? ● Before learning: assessing how difficult it will be to learn information and what kind of processing will be best ● During learning: can I stop now? Do I know this stuff? ● Improving retention: self-testing is more effective than review ● During assessments/exams: how confident am I in this answer A note on test taking strategy ● If you change an answer, when reviewing a test, you are more likely to change it to a correct answer than to an incorrect answer.

● WHY? ● Cueing and spreading activation Elaine crammed for 12 hours straight before her abnormal psych exam. She is confident she will remember the material for the exam. Her confidence is A. A metamemory judgment(correct answer) B. Delusional thinking C. Positivity bias D. Mood congruent Tip-of-the-tongue states include a feeling of knowing The tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT) is defined as the feeling of temporary inaccessibility. Accessibility means information is currently retrievable. (. Inaccessibility here means that an item is stored (available) in memory but cannot be retrieved at present) Control processes in metamemory ● Allocation of study time refers to the decisions participants make about which items to study during an experiment. ● What do you choose to study? How do you decide? ● Most people implicitly make judgments of learning to determine what to study. (Involves the behaviors we engage in to ensure learning. For example, when the student studying for two exams elects to focus her attention and study time on the social psychology class, she is engaged in control. Based on her monitoring, she may come to realize that statistics is hopeless—so she better do well in social psychology) Retrospective Confidence Retrospective confidence refers to the metacognitive judgment of certainty after you have recalled an item. Retrospective confidence is important in eyewitness situations. We expect witnesses to only give testimony if they are highly confident that they are correct. The Déjà Vu Experience ● Déjà vu experience: the feeling that a new situation has been experienced before ● The person may be absolutely certain that he or she has never been to a certain place before yet have an odd feeling of familiarity. (In the real world, familiarity might easily be generated in one domain, causing déjà vu in another domain.) The Déjà Vu Experience ● Anne Cleary and her colleagues (2012) developed a method to induce déjà vu under laboratory conditions. ● Participants move through virtual 3-D environments using virtual reality glasses, in two sessions. Navigate through multiple environments. ● Indicate when have feeling of déjà vu, rate familiarity of scenes The Déjà Vu Experience

(Déjà vu experiences are compelling when they occur. They have inspired people to think of spiritual origins (Brown, 2004). But a straightforward psychological experiment has yielded interpretable data (Cleary et al., 2012). In this way, memory science can bring scientific understanding to some of the most perplexing puzzles of human memory.)

The Déjà Vu Experience ● Cleary et al. (2012) found that there were more déjà vu experiences for scenes that were configurally similar to other earlier scenes than for scenes that were not. ● Familiarity was higher for the scenes that were configurally similar to other earlier scenes. ● Perceptual familiarity—the similarity in geometry between the earlier and later scenes—was causing déjà vu experiences. You can improve your metamemory and metacognitive skills ● Typically the greatest improvement in metacognitive skill takes place between ages 12 – 15 (early to mid-adolescence): BUT IT IS (almost) NEVER TOO LATE ● Monitor judgments of learning as you study, and the accuracy of your judgments (as you test yourself)!...