Abstract
Feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments are judgments of future recognizability of currently inaccessible information. They are known to depend both on the access to partial information about a target of retrieval and on the familiarity of the cue that is used as a memory probe. In the present study we assessed whether FOK judgments could also be shaped by incidental environmental context in which these judgments are made. To this end, we investigated 2 phenomena previously documented in studies on recognition memory—a context familiarity effect and a context reinstatement effect—in the procedure used to investigate FOK judgments. In 2 experiments, we found that FOK judgments increase in the presence of a familiar environmental context. The results of both experiments further revealed still higher FOK judgments when made in the presence of environmental context matching the encoding context of both cue and its associated target. The effect of context familiarity on FOK judgment was paralleled by an effect on the latencies of an unsuccessful memory search, but the effect of context reinstatement was not. Importantly, the elevated feeling of knowing in reinstated and familiar contexts was not accompanied by an increase in the accuracy of those judgments. Together, these results demonstrate that metacognitive processes are shaped by the overall volume of memory information accessed at retrieval, independently of whether this memory information is related to a cue, a target, or a context in which remembering takes place.
Highlights
Acts of learning and remembering always take place within a context, many aspects of which may be irrelevant or incidental to the focal content of the episode
The research on metamemory aspects of remembering has repeatedly addressed the issue of the basis of people’s conviction that certain inaccessible information is stored in memory—that is, their feeling of knowing—revealing that both the feeling of familiarity elicited by a memory question (Metcalfe, Schwartz, & Joaquim, 1993; Schwartz & Metcalfe, 1992) and any partial, incomplete, and sometimes even incorrect information about a sought-after target that comes to mind in the process of retrieval (Koriat, 1993, 1995) are relevant in this respect
If context reinstatement facilitates retrieval of partial target information, we would expect it to increase the accuracy of FOK judgments as access to some features of the target should be diagnostic of subsequent recognition
Summary
Acts of learning and remembering always take place within a context, many aspects of which may be irrelevant or incidental to the focal content of the episode. Studies on FOK judgments have revealed them to be related to various decisions participants make in a memory task, such as when to terminate memory search (Malmberg, 2008; Singer & Tiede, 2008) and whether it is worth restudying a particular target in a preparation for subsequent tests (Hanczakowski, Zawadzka, & Cockcroft-McKay, 2014). These findings indicate that processes associated with FOK judgments play an important role in effective regulation of the process of remembering
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