Metamemory in a familiar place: The effects of environmental context on feeling of knowing

Hanczakowski, MacIej ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8980-4918, Zawadzka, Katarzyna, Collie, Harriet and Macken, Bill ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2928-656X 2017. Metamemory in a familiar place: The effects of environmental context on feeling of knowing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 43 (1) , pp. 59-71. 10.1037/xlm0000292

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Abstract

Feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments are judgments of future recognizability of currently inaccessible information. They are known to depend both on the access to partial information about a target of retrieval and on the familiarity of the cue that is used as a memory probe. In the present study we assessed whether FOK judgments could also be shaped by incidental environmental context in which these judgments are made. To this end, we investigated 2 phenomena previously documented in studies on recognition memory-a context familiarity effect and a context reinstatement effect-in the procedure used to investigate FOK judgments. In 2 experiments, we found that FOK judgments increase in the presence of a familiar environmental context. The results of both experiments further revealed still higher FOK judgments when made in the presence of environmental context matching the encoding context of both cue and its associated target. The effect of context familiarity on FOK judgment was paralleled by an effect on the latencies of an unsuccessful memory search, but the effect of context reinstatement was not. Importantly, the elevated feeling of knowing in reinstated and familiar contexts was not accompanied by an increase in the accuracy of those judgments. Together, these results demonstrate that metacognitive processes are shaped by the overall volume of memory information accessed at retrieval, independently of whether this memory information is related to a cue, a target, or a context in which remembering takes place.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Psychology
Additional Information:	This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY license.
Publisher:	American Psychological Association
ISSN:	0278-7393
Funders:	ESRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 June 2016
Date of Acceptance:	3 April 2016
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 01:39
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/88854

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