THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF HUMAN MEMORY

1. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF HUMAN MEMORY • Tulving’s “autonoetic” or “self-knowing” view • Schacter: Remembering and the “role of the experiencer” • Metacognition • Our knowledge about our own knowledge and skills, and cognition in general • Metamemory • Our knowledge about the contents of our memory, our memory abilities, and theories about memory in general • Judgments can be based on • Familiarity of cue or cue domain • Accessibility of relevant target information • Amount of competitors retrieved

2. JUDGMENTS OF LEARNING • The design of a JOL experiment • Study a set of items • Judge “how well learned” was each item • Test memory at a later point • “Calibration” often poor • May depend on when the JOL is done • Dunlosky & Nelson 2004: • Integrative imagery vs. rote learning • Immediate or delayed JOL

3. STUDY TIME AND JOL’s • Do students widely distribute their study time? • Practicing the easy items: no pain, no gain • Practicing the hardest items: Laboring in Vain • Practicing the items most likely to benefit from practice: the Zone of Proximal Learning • Evidence that people do indeed allot study time to items “in the zone” • Metcalf, 2006 (SEPA!)

4. OTHER METAMEMORIAL JUDGMENTS • Feelings of knowing • When recall fails, judge the likelihood of recognition • In general, people well calibrated • Shimamura & Squire 1986: • 24 sentences: e.g., “at the museum, we saw some relics made of clay” • Recall target given sentence contexts • FOK’s to failed recall, then recognition FOK/Rec Group recall recog Correl. Normal 72% 55% +.71 Alcoholics 71% 62% +.53 Korsakoff’s 23% 33% .00

5. DECISIONS ABOUT IGNORANCEGlucksberg, 1980 How do we know we don’t know? Students study sentences: John owns a car Bob Doesn’t play golf Fred owns a bike etc Then decide about: decision time John owns a car TRUE 1280 Bob plays golfFALSE 1340 Fred plays golfDON’T KNOW ____