Episodic and semantic feeling-of-knowing in aging: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Previous research shows a complex pattern of preservation and deterioration in metacognition in aging. One contested area is in older adults’ performance on feeling-of-knowing (FOK) tasks. While semantic FOK (sFOK) is preserved with age, studies on episodic tasks (eFOK) produce equivocal findings. To address this issue, we present a meta-analysis evaluating the age-related performance using the FOK paradigm. We included data from 18 published papers dealing with eFOK or sFOK in aging. We analyzed the difference in metacognitive performance between younger and older adults, taking into account the major confound in this domain, the difference in performance levels, as a moderator. The published sFOK studies yielded no age effect (8 comparisons). For episodic memory, across 22 reported effects we find a reliable age difference on eFOK accuracy, although this is somewhat moderated when taking into account final recognition differences between groups. Moreover, using aggregated data of published and unpublished study conducted in our lab, we performed follow-up analyses investigating recall and recognition as explanations of the eFOK deficit observed in aging. We highlight several methodological issues inherent in such research (e.g., the over-reliance on non-parametric correlations to assess metacognitive sensitivity which can be influenced by differences in performance levels). We also discuss the possibility aside of such concerns that the eFOK deficit in aging is a consequence of a memory decline. Finally, we propose recommendations for future research.