People are poor at predicting their learning

April, 2011

A series of online experiments demonstrate that beliefs about memory, judgments of how likely you are to remember, and actual memory performance, are all largely independent of each other.

Research has shown that people are generally poor at predicting how likely they are to remember something. A recent study tested the theory that the reason we’re so often inaccurate is that we make predictions about memory based on how we feel while we're encountering the information to be learned, and that can lead us astray.

In three experiments, each involving about 80 participants ranging in age from late teens to senior citizens, participants were serially shown words in large or small fonts and asked to predict how well they'd remember each (actual font sizes depended on the participants’ browsers, since this was an online experiment and participants were in their own homes, but the larger size was four times larger than the other).

In the first experiment, each word was presented either once or twice, and participants were told if they would have another chance to study the word. The length of time the word was displayed on the first occasion was controlled by the participant. On the second occasion, words were displayed for four seconds, and participants weren’t asked to make a new prediction. At the end of the study phase, they had two minutes to type as many words as they remembered.

Recall was significantly better when an item was seen twice. Recall wasn’t affected by font size, but participants were significantly more likely to believe they’d recall those presented in larger fonts. While participants realized seeing an item twice would lead to greater recall, they greatly underestimated the benefits.

Because people so grossly discounted the benefit of a single repetition, in the next experiment the comparison was between one and four study trials. This time, participants gave more weight to having three repetitions versus none, but nevertheless, their predictions were still well below the actual benefits of the repetitions.

In the third experiment, participants were given a simplified description of the first experiment and either asked what effect they’d expect font size to have, or what effect having two study trials would have. The results (similar levels of belief in the benefits of each condition) neither resembled the results in the first experiment (indicating that those people’s predictions hadn’t been made on the basis of their beliefs about memory effects), or the actual performance (demonstrating that people really aren’t very good at predicting their memory performance).

These findings were confirmed in a further experiment, in which participants were asked about both variables (rather than just one).

The findings confirm other evidence that (a) general memory knowledge tends to be poor, (b) personal memory awareness tends to be poor, and (c) ease of processing is commonly used as a heuristic to predict whether something will be remembered.

 

Addendum: a nice general article on this topic by the lead researcher Nate Kornell has just come out in Miller-McCune

Reference: 

Kornell, N., Rhodes, M. G., Castel, A. D., & Tauber, S. K. (in press). The ease of processing heuristic and the stability bias: Dissociating memory, memory beliefs, and memory judgments. Psychological Science.

Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.