The contributions of anchoring and past-test performance to the underconfidence-with-practice effect

Abstract

In the underconfidence-with-practice effect, people's judgments of learning (JOLs) typically underestimate memory performance across multiple study-test phases. Whereas the past-test hypothesis suggests that this underconfidence stems from participants' reliance on earlier test performance to make subsequent JOLs (despite new learning), the anchoring hypothesis suggests that the underconfidence stems from participants' reliance on a fixed psychological anchor point low on the JOL scale to make their JOLs. To contrast the predictions of these hypotheses, we had college students study, make JOLs, and test over several dozen pairedassociate items across two study-test phases. We parametrically manipulated the presence or absence of testing and judging within participants during Phase 1. Contrary to the past-test hypothesis, items tested during Phase 1 demonstrated less underconfidence during Phase 2 than did nontested items. Furthermore, participants did not increase JOLs from Phase 1 to Phase 2 for items that they had not recalled or for items that had not been tested at all, suggesting that the underconfidence stemmed largely from participants' overreliance on a psychological anchor point to make their JOLs. Past test performance, however, seems to be a major cue that participants use to adjust their JOLs away from the anchor, reducing underconfidence. This was most evident when we used a between-participants manipulation (Exp. 2) to cause our participants to anchor their JOLs either high or low on the JOL scale, producing differential underconfidence independent of any adjustment. Taken together, these results support the anchoring hypothesis over the past-test hypothesis for explaining underconfidence with practice.

Can young children be more accurate predictors of their recall performance?

“…According to this heuristic, a prediction that occurs on a second trial is based on memory for performance on a prior test trial (England & Serra, 2012;Finn & Metcalfe, 2007, 2008. Recently, Lipko et al (2012) asked children of different ages to make recall predictions for the same pictures across multiple trials and found that kindergarteners did not consistently rely on this heuristic, whereas third-graders did consistently use it.…”

Fluency and Feeling of Rightness

“…Although the underlying cognitive mechanisms of the anchoring effect are still under study, the anchoring effect is a robust phenomenon which has been extensively studied in persuasion, attitude, judgments and decision-making (for review, see Furnham & Boo, 2011). Although, it has not been widely investigated as a potential cue to examine metacognitive judgments, the available data suggest that anchoring can be used to manipulate metacognitive judgements such as JOL (England & Serra, 2012;Yang, Sun, & Shanks, 2018;Zhao, 2012;Zhao & Linderholm, 2011), and by extension, FOR.…”

The effects of distraction on metacognition and metacognition on distraction: evidence from recognition memory

“…Calibration scores are usually interpreted in terms of realism of metacognitive monitoring: when mean confidence judgments are lower than memory performance participants are said to be underconfident and when mean confidence judgments are higher than memory performance participants are said to be overconfident. However, the psychological interpretations of calibration measures have recently been questioned based on the observation that calibration scores derived from confidence judgments do not chime with the results derived from other tasks, like binary judgments or betting decisions (Hanczakowski etal., 2013; Higham etal., in press; see also Scheck and Nelson, 2005; England and Serra, 2012, for related discussion). Given the theoretical problems surrounding calibration results, we did not analyze this aspect of the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring in the present study.…”