Metacognition
Do older adults know when their memory is right?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Older adults remembered less than younger adults but judged the accuracy of their own memories just as well, and both groups' confidence was more informative for remembered word pairs than for single words.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 2 (age group: younger vs older, between) x 2 (test type: item vs associative recognition, within) mixed design with trial-by-trial confidence ratings across four study-test blocks
- N
- N=49 · 28 younger and 29 older adults recruited; 4 younger and 5 older excluded for near-chance discrimination, leaving 24 younger and 25 older adults
- Population
- US undergraduates aged 18-21 and community-dwelling older adults aged 64-85
- Outcome
- Metacognitive efficiency (meta-d'/d'), metacognitive sensitivity (meta-d') and recognition sensitivity (d') for single words and word pairs
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Key findings
Older adults had lower recognition sensitivity than younger adults, but metacognitive efficiency did not differ by age, and a Bayes factor of about 4.75 favoured no age difference. Both groups were close to optimal efficiency. Metacognitive efficiency was higher for word pairs than for single words (a small-to-moderate effect), even though memory accuracy did not differ between the two test types. The classic gamma correlation measure showed no age or task effects, so the task difference only emerged with signal-detection measures.
Methodology
Younger and older adults studied lists of 30 unrelated word pairs, then took two recognition tests: one asking whether single words were old or new, and one asking whether pairs were intact or rearranged. After every answer they rated their confidence from 1 to 6. The researchers used a signal-detection measure, meta-d'/d', which asks how well confidence separates correct from incorrect answers after adjusting for how good memory itself was.
Limitations
The sample was small and the final groups excluded 4 younger and 5 older adults whose memory was near chance, which may have removed the older adults with the weakest memory and flattered the age comparison. The expected age-by-task interaction in memory (a larger associative deficit for older adults) was not significant, so the study cannot say whether older adults are aware of an associative memory deficit. The explanation that encoding strategies such as linking images boost pair confidence was not measured, and results may not generalise to other kinds of metacognitive judgment (like judgments of learning) or to recall tests. The power analysis was run after data collection, which the authors acknowledge.
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