TY - JOUR
T1 - Framing affects scale usage for judgments of learning, not confidence in memory
AU - England, Benjamin D.
AU - Ortegren, Francesca R.
AU - Serra, Michael J.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Psychological Association.
PY - 2017/12
Y1 - 2017/12
N2 - Framing metacognitive judgments of learning (JOLs) in terms of the likelihood of forgetting rather than remembering consistently yields a counterintuitive outcome: The mean of participants' forget-framed JOLs is often higher (after reverse-scoring) than the mean of their remember-framed JOLs, suggesting greater confidence in memory. In the present experiments, we tested 2 competing explanations for this pattern of results. The optimistic-anchoring hypothesis suggests that forget-framed JOLs are associated with greater optimism about memory than are remember-framed JOLs, which leads to their greater magnitude. The differential-scaling hypothesis suggests that forget-framed JOLs and remember-framed JOLs will often be distributed differently across the JOL scale, resulting in means that also often differ. Participants in 3 experiments studied simple memory materials and made JOLs predicting their memory performance for those items. They made their JOLs in terms of either the likelihood of remembering or forgetting. In contrast to the optimistic-anchoring hypothesis, the mean of participants' forget-framed JOLs was unaffected by information concerning the supposed difficulty of the task (Experiment 1), was lower than for remember-framed JOLs in a task selected to evoke high JOLs (Experiment 2), and demonstrated equivalent confidence in memory when participants were restricted to a yes-no binary response (Experiment 3). In support of the differential-scaling hypothesis, participants' forget-framed JOLs were consistently symmetrically distributed across the JOL scale, resulting in a mean at the center of the judgment scale that was often higher than that for remember-framed JOLs. Framing therefore affects how participants scale their JOLs, not their confidence in their memory.
AB - Framing metacognitive judgments of learning (JOLs) in terms of the likelihood of forgetting rather than remembering consistently yields a counterintuitive outcome: The mean of participants' forget-framed JOLs is often higher (after reverse-scoring) than the mean of their remember-framed JOLs, suggesting greater confidence in memory. In the present experiments, we tested 2 competing explanations for this pattern of results. The optimistic-anchoring hypothesis suggests that forget-framed JOLs are associated with greater optimism about memory than are remember-framed JOLs, which leads to their greater magnitude. The differential-scaling hypothesis suggests that forget-framed JOLs and remember-framed JOLs will often be distributed differently across the JOL scale, resulting in means that also often differ. Participants in 3 experiments studied simple memory materials and made JOLs predicting their memory performance for those items. They made their JOLs in terms of either the likelihood of remembering or forgetting. In contrast to the optimistic-anchoring hypothesis, the mean of participants' forget-framed JOLs was unaffected by information concerning the supposed difficulty of the task (Experiment 1), was lower than for remember-framed JOLs in a task selected to evoke high JOLs (Experiment 2), and demonstrated equivalent confidence in memory when participants were restricted to a yes-no binary response (Experiment 3). In support of the differential-scaling hypothesis, participants' forget-framed JOLs were consistently symmetrically distributed across the JOL scale, resulting in a mean at the center of the judgment scale that was often higher than that for remember-framed JOLs. Framing therefore affects how participants scale their JOLs, not their confidence in their memory.
KW - Forgetting
KW - Framing
KW - Judgment magnitude
KW - Judgments of learning
KW - Metacognition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85038127051&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/xlm0000420
DO - 10.1037/xlm0000420
M3 - Article
C2 - 28504530
AN - SCOPUS:85038127051
SN - 0278-7393
VL - 43
SP - 1898
EP - 1908
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
IS - 12
ER -