ERIC Number: EJ1165857
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018-Jan
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0278-7393
EISSN: N/A
Aging and Confidence Judgments in Item Recognition
Voskuilen, Chelsea; Ratcliff, Roger; McKoon, Gail
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v44 n1 p1-23 Jan 2018
We examined the effects of aging on performance in an item-recognition experiment with confidence judgments. A model for confidence judgments and response time (RTs; Ratcliff & Starns, 2013) was used to fit a large amount of data from a new sample of older adults and a previously reported sample of younger adults. This model of confidence judgments allows us to distinguish between changes evidence from memory and changes in decision-related components and it accounts for both RT distributions and response proportions. Older adults took longer to respond than younger adults, older adults exhibited a small decrease in the strength of evidence from memory compared with younger adults and a slight bias toward judging items as "old." The difference in RTs between the 2 age groups was primarily explained by the difference in the nondecision component. Although our small sample size makes the general conclusions about aging tentative, the results are consistent with other research examining the effects of aging in two-choice RT tasks and response-signal tasks, and the study demonstrates that confidence judgment choice proportion and RT distribution data from older adults can be fit with the response time and confidence 2 (RTCON2) model.
Descriptors: Aging (Individuals), Recognition (Psychology), Familiarity, Metacognition, Reaction Time, Older Adults, Young Adults, Age Differences, Comparative Analysis, Memory, Decision Making Skills, Evaluative Thinking, Task Analysis, Models, Accuracy, Undergraduate Students, Word Recognition, Word Lists, Experiments, Statistical Analysis, Performance
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Institute on Aging (DHHS/NIH)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: R01AG041176