THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF
HUMAN MEMORY
• Tulving’s “autonoetic” or “selfknowing” 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
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
Judgments of Learning
70
60
JOL Magnitude
50
Imagery
Rote
40
30
20
10
0
Immediate
Delayed
Timing of JOLs
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!)
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
Group
Normal
Alcoholics
Korsakoff’s
recall
72%
71%
23%
recog
55%
62%
33%
FOK/Rec
Correl.
+.71
+.53
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DECISIONS ABOUT IGNORANCE
Glucksberg, 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 golf
FALSE
1340
Fred plays golf
DON’T KNOW ____