Age-Related Differences in Strategy Knowledge Updating: Blocked Testing Produces Greater Improvements in Metacognitive Accuracy for Younger than Older Adults

Previous work has demonstrated that, when given feedback, younger adults are more likely to correct high-confidence errors compared with low-confidence errors, a finding termed the hypercorrection effect. Research examining the hypercorrection effect in both older and younger adults has demonstrated that the relationship between confidence and error correction was stronger for younger adults compared with older adults. Their results demonstrated that the relationship between confidence and error correction was stronger for younger adults compared with older adults. However, recent work suggests that error correction is largely related to prior knowledge, while confidence may primarily serve as a proxy for prior knowledge. Prior knowledge generally remains stable or increases with age; thus, the current experiment explored how both confidence and prior knowledge contributed to error correction in younger and older adults. Participants answered general knowledge questions, rated how confident they were that their response was correct, received correct answer feedback, and rated their prior knowledge of the correct response. Overall, confidence was related to error correction for younger adults, but this relationship was much smaller for older adults. However, prior knowledge was strongly related to error correction for both younger and older adults. Confidence alone played little unique role in error correction after controlling for the role of prior knowledge. These data demonstrate that prior knowledge largely predicts error correction and suggests that both older and younger adults can use their prior knowledge to effectively correct errors in memory.

Section: Explanations Of the Hypercorrection Effectmentioning

confidence: 95%

The role of prior knowledge in error correction for younger and older adults

Sitzman

Rhodes

Tauber

et al. 2015

“…It seems that participants did not update their metacognitive judgments within one passage (i.e., after completing the proofreading task) or between passages (i.e., having task experience with a prediction-proofreadingpostdiction session already completed), which is inconsistent with Dunlosky and Hertzog (2000), in which participants became more accurate in their metacognitive judgments with task experience. However, Dunlosky and Hertzog (2000) did find that difference scores contrasting performance with predictions and postdictions were worse for the second list than the first list, such that people became more underconfident in their performance when using interactive imagery to study paired-associates (see also Hertzog et al, 2009;Price, Hertzog, & Dunlosky, 2008). In the present study, it may be necessary to have direct feedback or several trials (more than just two) in which participants become more aware of their performance, and what factors influence the strategies that are used during proofreading and when making metacognitive judgments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Metacognition and proofreading: the roles of aging, motivation, and interest

Hargis

Yue

Kerr

et al. 2016

The current study examined younger and older adults' error detection accuracy, prediction calibration, and postdiction calibration on a proofreading task, to determine if age-related differences would be present in this type of common error detection task. Participants were given text passages, and were first asked to predict the percentage of errors they would detect in the passage. They then read the passage and circled errors (which varied in complexity and locality), and made postdictions regarding their performance, before repeating this with another passage and answering a comprehension test of both passages. There were no age-related differences in error detection accuracy, text comprehension, or metacognitive calibration, though participants in both age groups were overconfident overall in their metacognitive judgments. Both groups gave similar ratings of motivation to complete the task. The older adults rated the passages as more interesting than younger adults did, although this level of interest did not appear to influence error-detection performance. The age equivalence in both proofreading ability and calibration suggests that the ability to proofread text passages and the associated metacognitive monitoring used in judging one's own performance are maintained in aging. These age-related similarities persisted when younger adults completed the proofreading tasks on a computer screen, rather than with paper and pencil. The findings provide novel insights regarding the influence that cognitive aging may have on metacognitive accuracy and text processing in an everyday task.

“…Consequently, an important question concerns the ability of older adults to learn about the effectiveness of different strategies from their experience of tasks. By comparing strategy utilization of imagery and rote repetition for two distinct lists of word pairs, Price, Hertzog, and Dunlosky (2008) found that older adults learn about the superiority of imagery of rote repetition during associative learning, but to a lesser extent than young adults.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Strategy selection and aging: Impact of item concreteness in paired-associate task

Tournier¹,

Postal²

2011

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of aging on strategy selection in a paired-associate word task. Twenty-eight younger adults (mean age = 20.68 years) and 28 older adults (mean age = 68.46 years) studied 39 pairs of concrete, middle and abstract words. The concreteness level was manipulated in order to modify the benefit of imagery and sentence strategies in relation to task characteristics. The results showed an age difference in strategy selection in relation to concreteness level. Older adults showed less adaptive strategy selection for the imagery strategy but not for the sentence strategy. Change in strategy selection did not seem to be explained by better efficiency of sentence than imagery, so this study suggests a partial reduction of strategy adaptivity during aging.