ERIC Number: EJ934201
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011-May
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0096-3445
EISSN: N/A
Strong Memories Are Hard to Scale
Mickes, Laura; Hwe, Vivian; Wais, Peter E.; Wixted, John T.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, v140 n2 p239-257 May 2011
People are generally skilled at using a confidence scale to rate the strength of their memories over a wide range. Specifically, low-confidence recognition decisions are often associated with close-to-chance accuracy, whereas high-confidence recognition decisions can be associated with close-to-perfect accuracy. However, using a 20-point rating scale, the authors found that the ability to scale memory strength had its limitations in that a high proportion of list items received the highest rating of 20. Efforts to induce participants to differentiate between these strong memories using emphatic instructions and alternative scales were not successful. Remember/know judgments indicated that these strong and hard-to-scale memories were often based on familiarity (not just recollection). Providing error feedback on a plurals discrimination task finally produced a high-confidence criterion shift. The authors suggest that the ability to scale strong (and almost perfectly accurate) memories may be limited because of the absence of differential error feedback for very strong memories in the past (the kind of differential error feedback that may account for the memory-scaling expertise that participants otherwise exhibit). (Contains 13 figures, 5 tables and 2 footnotes.)
Descriptors: Expertise, Familiarity, Rating Scales, Children, Memory, Error Correction, Recognition (Psychology), Theories, Undergraduate Students, Universities, Computer Assisted Testing, Visual Stimuli, Psychology, Experimental Psychology, Information Technology
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: California
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A