High-confidence Errors Research Articles

Aging, confidence, and misinformation: recalling information with the cognitive interview.

In 2 experiments, younger and older adults witnessed a simulated robbery, received misleading information about the event, and then were interviewed with the Cognitive Interview about their memory for the robbery. In both experiments, older adults were disproportionately more confident than younger adults in the accuracy of incorrect information that they recalled than in the accuracy of correct information. Critically, this age-related increase in high-confidence errors occurred even in comparison with younger adults who were matched with older adults on the overall amount and accuracy of the information remembered about the robbery. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that retrieval warnings to disregard the misinformation were just as effective in older adults as compared with younger adults at reducing the reporting of misleading information. Finally, both experiments showed that across the multiple retrieval stages of the Cognitive Interview, the final retrieval stage is roughly half as effective for older adults relative to younger adults at eliciting previously unreported information. These results indicate that investigators have much less to gain from older adults than they do from younger adults with repeated inquiries (during the same session) about a witnessed event.

The role of prior knowledge in error correction for younger and older adults

Previous work has demonstrated that, when given feedback, younger adults are more likely to correct high-confidence errors compared with low-confidence errors, a finding termed the hypercorrection effect. Research examining the hypercorrection effect in both older and younger adults has demonstrated that the relationship between confidence and error correction was stronger for younger adults compared with older adults. However, recent work suggests that error correction is largely related to prior knowledge, while confidence may primarily serve as a proxy for prior knowledge. Prior knowledge generally remains stable or increases with age; thus, the current experiment explored how both confidence and prior knowledge contributed to error correction in younger and older adults. Participants answered general knowledge questions, rated how confident they were that their response was correct, received correct answer feedback, and rated their prior knowledge of the correct response. Overall, confidence was related to error correction for younger adults, but this relationship was much smaller for older adults. However, prior knowledge was strongly related to error correction for both younger and older adults. Confidence alone played little unique role in error correction after controlling for the role of prior knowledge. These data demonstrate that prior knowledge largely predicts error correction and suggests that both older and younger adults can use their prior knowledge to effectively correct errors in memory.

Hypercorrection of high confidence errors: Prior testing both enhances delayed performance and blocks the return of the errors

How people correct their mistakes and sustain those corrections over time is a problem of central interest to education. It might be thought that the erroneous beliefs that people hold with high confidence would be especially difficult to correct. Interestingly, people correct these high confidence errors more easily than low confidence errors, a phenomenon known as the ‘hypercorrection effect’. Unfortunately, though, with a delay in testing there is a tendency for some of these high confidence errors to reemerge – a finding with serious consequences for education. This study investigated the effect of intervening a test immediately after corrective feedback on preventing the return of the errors. It also investigated processing differences between prevention-focused and promotion-focused people. The most educationally important new finding was that testing immediately after corrective feedback not only greatly enhanced memory for the correct answers but also blocked the return of the errors.

Rapid expert tool for different professions based on estimated ecosystem variables for retrofitting of drainage systems

There is a need for a geospatial decision support tool for different professions such as drainage engineers and urban planners, which is useful for a quick assessment of the potential of ecosystem services when retrofitting sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) in urban areas. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop an innovative rapid decision support tool based on ecosystem service variables for retrofitting of key SuDS techniques by different professionals such as drainage engineers, developers, ecologists, planners and social scientists. This unique and transparent spreadsheet-based tool proposes the retrofitting of a SuDS technique that obtained the highest ecosystem service score for an urban site. This approach is based on a novel ecosystem service philosophy adapted to SuDS rather than on traditional engineering judgement associated with variables based on quick community and environment assessments. For the Greater Manchester example case study area, a comparison with the traditional approach of determining community and environment variables indicates that infiltration trenches, soakaways and belowground storage systems are usually less preferred than permeable pavement systems regardless of the professional perspective. However, ponds also received relatively high scores, because of their great potential impact in terms of water quality improvement and flood control. The estimation of variables was undertaken with high confidence and manageable error.

Selecting Sustainable Drainage Structures Based on Ecosystem Service Variables Estimated by Different Stakeholder Groups

In times of recession, expert systems supporting environmental managers undergo a revival. However, the retrofitting of sustainable water structures is currently undertaken ad hoc using engineering experience supported by minimal formal guidance. There is a lack of practical decision tools that can be used by different professions for the rapid assessment of ecosystem services that can be created when retrofitting water structures. Thus the aim was to develop an innovative decision support tool based on the rapid estimation of novel ecosystem service variables at low cost and acceptable uncertainty. The tool proposes the retrofitting of those sustainable drainage systems that obtained the highest ecosystem services score for a specific urban site subject to professional bias. The estimation of variables was undertaken with high confidence and manageable error at low cost. In comparison to common public opinion, statistically significant differences between social scientists and the general public for the estimation of land costs using the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U-test were found. It was also surprising to find no significant differences in the estimation of habitat for species by civil engineers and ecologists. The new methodology may lead to an improvement of the existing urban landscape by promoting ecosystem services.

Hypercorrection of High Confidence Errors in Lexical Representations

Memory errors associated with higher confidence are more likely to be corrected than errors made with lower confidence, a phenomenon called the hypercorrection effect. This study investigated whether the hypercorrection effect occurs with phonological information of lexical representations. In Experiment 1, 15 participants performed a Japanese Kanji word-reading task, in which the words had several possible pronunciations. In the initial task, participants were required to read aloud each word and indicate their confidence in their response; this was followed by receipt of visual feedback of the correct response. A hypercorrection effect was observed, indicating generality of this effect beyond previous observations in memories based upon semantic or episodic representations. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2, in which 40 participants performed the same task as in Experiment 1. When the participant's ratings of the practical value of the words were controlled, a partial correlation between confidence and likelihood of later correcting the initial mistaken response was reduced. This suggests that the hypercorrection effect may be partially caused by an individual's recognition of the practical value of reading the words correctly.

High-Confidence Vertical Positioning for Extended-Reach Wells

This article, written by Senior Technology Editor Dennis Denney, contains highlights of paper SPE 151441, ’High-Confidence Vertical Positioning for Extended-Reach Wells,’ by Nelson Mohammed, SPE, and Michael Terpening, SPE, Schlumberger, prepared for the 2012 IADC/SPE Drilling Conference and Exhibition, San Diego, California, 6-8 March. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Establishing confidence in the vertical thickness of the hydrocarbon column is critical in development-project economics. True-vertical-depth (TVD) uncertainty associated with the hydrocarbon column, in the absence of vertical-appraisal-well data, may be dominated by the propagation of inclination error in nonvertical or horizontal pilot wells. The challenges associated with establishing reliable hydrocarbon-column height can be extreme if high-step-out extended-reach (ER) wells are the primary source of appraisal data. Also, thin reservoirs targeted by ER wells often have a limited vertical target on the basis of standard TVD-error-propagation models. Three complementary elements were integrated to improve the TVD uncertainty associated with ER well paths. Application Challenge The application was made in an offshore field near Sakhalin Island in eastern Russia. The structure has several appraisal wells drilled by various operators through the 1980s. A recent development-drilling campaign with ER wells was conducted that enabled evaluating and testing of the proposed high-confidence error models. Vintage appraisal wells proved the presence of oil and provided information on the hydraulic regime with flow tests. However, there was no full penetration in a single well of the hydrocarbon column in the main sands, resulting in large gas/oil-contact (GOC) and oil/water-contact (OWC) uncertainties that precluded an economically reliable measure of oil-in-place volumes. The quality of available seismic data was poor, and environmental and economic limitations existed for upgrading data or further appraisal drilling to address uncertainties. The chosen development option was to drill from a shore location and use extended-reach-drilling (ERD) techniques with horizontal production holes to reach the reservoirs. Hence, certainty of the OWCs and GOCs was essential for proper placement of the horizontal production holes within the oil column. The vertical uncertainty associated with ERD would need to be minimized to assess the hydrocarbon column and to place the horizontal production wells properly. As Fig. 1 shows, the first two production wells were designed to use separate pilot holes, downward through water (Well-1) and upward through gas (Well-2), to acquire formation-pressure-while-drilling data to characterize the hydraulic regime better. The primary objective was a direct determination of the fluid-column contacts, or an accurate inference of the contacts through a well- defined pressure-gradient profile. TVD Assurance Through Synergy Redundant data from two separate but comparable inclination sensors in the same bottomhole assembly (BHA) [in the measurement-while-drilling (MWD) and rotary-steering-system (RSS) tools, respectively] were used to permit a statistical reduction in the error from multiple independent measurements. Because the sensors are in separate sections of the same BHA, the data enable a robust cross check to ensure that the sag corrections for each sensor are simultaneously consistent.

Neural Correlates of People's Hypercorrection of Their False Beliefs

Despite the intuition that strongly held beliefs are particularly difficult to change, the data on error correction indicate that general information errors that people commit with a high degree of belief are especially easy to correct. This finding is called the hypercorrection effect. The hypothesis was tested that the reason for hypercorrection stems from enhanced attention and encoding that results from a metacognitive mismatch between the person's confidence in their responses and the true answer. This experiment, which is the first to use imaging to investigate the hypercorrection effect, provided support for this hypothesis, showing that both metacognitive mismatch conditions-that in which high confidence accompanies a wrong answer and that in which low confidence accompanies a correct answer-revealed anterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus activations. Only in the high confidence error condition, however, was an error that conflicted with the true answer mentally present. And only the high confidence error condition yielded activations in the right TPJ and the right dorsolateral pFC. These activations suggested that, during the correction process after error commission, people (1) were entertaining both the false belief as well as the true belief (as in theory of mind tasks, which also manifest the right TPJ activation) and (2) may have been suppressing the unwanted, incorrect information that they had, themselves, produced (as in think/no-think tasks, which also manifest dorsolateral pFC activation). These error-specific processes as well as enhanced attention because of metacognitive mismatch appear to be implicated.

A Computational Model for Spatial Working Memory Deficits in Schizophrenia

Cognitive deficits in schizophrenia have been hypothesized to be caused by altered synaptic transmission in circuits of the prefrontal cortex. 2 main hypotheses have been put forward: reduced inhibition and hypofunctional NMDA receptors. Recently, Lee et al. (2008) found that spatial working memory deficits in schizophrenic patients include a disproportionately high incidence of high-confidence error responses. Here, we have studied what synaptic dysfunction can generate this specific behavioral deficit using a computational network model of spatial working memory. We developed quantitative behavioral readout from our network simulations, which reflected the qualitative properties of underlying neural dynamics. We then analyzed the behavioral effect of the GABAergic and glutamatergic hypotheses on our network simulations. We found that reduction in inhibitory transmission in the network caused a reduction in performance through an increase of high-confidence errors, as in the experimental data. In contrast, a concerted reduction in NMDA-receptor-dependent transmission reduced performance via increased low-confidence errors. Only when NMDA receptors were specifically depleted in interneurons did the behavioral read-out of our network mimic the behavioral results for schizophrenic patients. Thus, dynamics in our model network support a role of both global inhibition reduction and hypofunctional NMDA receptors in interneurons in generating the behavioral deficits of simple spatial working memory tasks in schizophrenia.

“Don't give me that look” — Overconfidence in false mental state perception in schizophrenia

Dysfunctions in social cognition are implicated in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and have been extensively replicated over the years. For memory research, the administration of cognitive tasks with metacognitive aspects like confidence ratings has deepened our insight into how impairments contribute to symptoms of the disorder. A total of 76 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and a sample of 30 healthy participants were tested with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (Eyes-test). The Eyes-test was complemented with a rating scale requesting response confidence and was administered along with paradigms tapping neuropsychological parameters and cognitive insight. Schizophrenia patients showed impaired abilities on mental state perception. In addition, they committed more high-confidence errors and at the same time made fewer high-confidence correct responses. Impairments were most pronounced in patients with formal thought disorder. The patients displayed a decreased metacognitive awareness for their deficits. The results suggest that adding confidence ratings to the investigation of social cognition promises to advance our understanding of social cognition in schizophrenia. Patients not only show severe impairments in social cognition, but are overconfident in their judgments and lack cognitive insight into their deficits. The results highlight the need for metacognitive therapeutic approaches for the treatment of this population.

Hypercorrection of high confidence errors in children

Three experiments investigated whether the hypercorrection effect – the finding that errors committed with high confidence are easier, rather than more difficult, to correct than are errors committed with low confidence – occurs in grade school children as it does in young adults. All three experiments showed that Grade 3–6 children hypercorrected high confidence errors and the children also claimed that they ‘knew those answers all along.’ Experiment 2 included two second-guess tasks following error commission, one in which the children attempted to choose the correct answer from six options and the other in which they tried to generate a correct second response. Neither provided evidence that children actually knew high confidence corrections all along. Experiment 3, however, showed that the children had some preferential partial knowledge insofar as they needed fewer hints to guess the correct answers to high confidence than to low confidence errors.

The hypercorrection effect persists over a week, but high-confidence errors return

People's knowledge about the world often contains misconceptions that are well-learned and firmly believed. Although such misconceptions seem hard to correct, recent research has demonstrated that errors made with higher confidence are more likely to be corrected with feedback, a finding called the hypercorrection effect. We investigated whether this effect persists over a 1-week delay. Subjects answered general-knowledge questions about science, rated their confidence in each response, and received correct answer feedback. Half of the subjects reanswered the same questions immediately, while the other half reanswered them after a 1-week delay. The hypercorrection effect occurred on both the immediate and delayed final tests, but error correction decreased on the delayed test. When subjects failed to correct an error on the delayed test, they sometimes reproduced the same error from the initial test. Interestingly, high-confidence errors were more likely than low-confidence errors to be reproduced on the delayed test. These findings help to contextualize the hypercorrection effect within the broader memory literature by showing that high-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected, but they are also more likely to be reproduced if the correct answer is forgotten.

People's hypercorrection of high-confidence errors: did they know it all along?

This study investigated the "knew it all along" explanation of the hypercorrection effect. The hypercorrection effect refers to the finding that when people are given corrective feedback, errors that are committed with high confidence are easier to correct than low-confidence errors. Experiment 1 showed that people were more likely to claim that they knew it all along when they were given the answers to high-confidence errors as compared with low-confidence errors. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated whether people really did know the correct answers before being told or whether the claim in Experiment 1 was mere hindsight bias. Experiment 2 showed that (a) participants were more likely to choose the correct answer in a 2nd guess multiple-choice test when they had expressed an error with high rather than low confidence and (b) that they were more likely to generate the correct answers to high-confidence as compared with low-confidence errors after being told they were wrong and to try again. Experiment 3 showed that (c) people were more likely to produce the correct answer when given a 2-letter cue to high- rather than low-confidence errors and that (d) when feedback was scaffolded by presenting the target letters 1 by 1, people needed fewer such letter prompts to reach the correct answers when they had committed high- rather than low-confidence errors. These results converge on the conclusion that when people said that they knew it all along, they were right. This knowledge, no doubt, contributes to why they are able to correct those high-confidence errors so easily.

Correcting False Memories

While often impressive, memory is far from perfect. For example, the sentence “The karate champion hit the cinder block” is often misremembered as “The karate champion broke the cinder block” (Brewer, 1977). Hearing a list of related words such as “bed, rest, tired …” leads people to claim “sleep” was presented when in fact it was not (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Answering the question “How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn while traveling along the country road?” increases witnesses’ later reports of having seen a non-existent barn in an earlier video (Loftus, 1975, p. 566). These examples represent just a few of the many ways in which memory can go astray. Not only are these errors easily created, they often become vivid false memories held with high confidence. For example, false memories for non-presented words like “sleep” are so vivid that people often claim to remember which of two voices said the word (Payne, Elie, Blackwell, & Neuschatz, 1996). False memories can be strikingly persistent. Warnings about memory errors are rarely effective (McDermott & Roediger, 1998), especially after the study phase (Greene, Flynn, & Loftus, 1982). Re-exposure to events is insufficient; hearing “bed, rest, tired …” again reduces, but does not eliminate, false memories for “sleep” (McDermott, 1996; Watson, McDermott, & Balota, 2004). Even interventions that pinpoint specific contradictions between subjects’ memories and the original events are inadequate; many errors remain uncorrected even after subjects place an X next to each false memory (McConnell & Hunt, 2007). Despite much evidence that false memories are difficult to correct, a finding from another literature allows a surprising prediction about the correction of false memories. In a prototypical experiment demonstrating the hypercorrection effect, participants answer general knowledge questions and rate their confidence in each response before viewing the correct answer. High-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected on a second test than are incorrect guesses (Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001). Someone who strongly believes that Sydney is the capital of Australia will benefit more from the feedback “Canberra” than someone who simply guessed “Sydney.” The parallel in the false memory domain would be surprising, predicting that confidently-held false memories should be corrected more often than other errors. To examine this, we created false memories using sentences that encourage inferences; for example, “The clumsy chemist had acid on his coat” is often misremembered as “The clumsy chemist spilled acid on his coat.” We examined ability to correct false memories as a function of initial confidence in the errors.

Trait individual difference of reinforcement-based decision criterial learning during episodic recognition judgments

Although it is known that there are personality characteristic variances in the sensitivity to environmental feedback, the trait individual difference has scarcely been explored in the context of recognition memory decision. The present study investigated this issue by examining the relationship between the feedback-based adaptive flexibility of recognition criterion positioning and personality differences in general sensitivity to non-laboratory outcomes. Experiment 1 demonstrated that veridical feedback itself had little effect on the recognition decision criterion whereas Experiment 2 demonstrated that biased feedback manipulations selectively restricted to high confidence errors, induced shifts even in the overall Old/New category criterion. Critically, individual differences in stable personality characteristic linked to reward seeking(Behavioral Activation System-BAS) and anxiety avoidance (Behavioral Inhibition System-BIS) has been shown to predict the sensitivity of subjects to this form of feedback-induced criterion learning. This data further support the idea that incremental reinforcement-based learning mechanism not often considered important during explicit recognition decisions may play a key role in criterion setting.

The Spatial and Temporal Construction of Confidence in the Visual Scene

Human subjects can report many items of a cluttered field a few hundred milliseconds after stimulus presentation. This memory decays rapidly and after a second only 3 or 4 items can be stored in working memory. Here we compared the dynamics of objective performance with a measure of subjective report and we observed that 1) Objective performance beyond explicit subjective reports (blindsight) was significantly more pronounced within a short temporal interval and within specific locations of the visual field which were robust across sessions 2) High confidence errors (false beliefs) were largely confined to a small spatial window neighboring the cue. The size of this window did not change in time 3) Subjective confidence showed a moderate but consistent decrease with time, independent of all other experimental factors. Our study allowed us to asses quantitatively the temporal and spatial access to an objective response and to subjective reports.

Committing memory errors with high confidence: Older adults do but children don't

We investigated lifespan differences of confidence calibration in episodic memory, particularly the susceptibility to high-confidence errors within samples of children, teenagers, younger adults, and older adults. Using an associative recognition memory paradigm, we drew a direct link between older adults’ associative deficit and high-confidence errors. We predicted that only older adults would show high-confidence error even though their memory performance was at a similar level to that of children. Participants of all ages showed higher confidence following correct responses compared to incorrect responses, demonstrating the ability to calibrate subjective confidence in relation to memory accuracy. However, older adults were disproportionately more likely to indicate high confidence following erroneously remembered word pairs than participants of the other three age groups. Results are discussed in relation to the misrecollection account of high-confidence errors and ageing-related decline in hippocampus-dependent episodic memory functions.

Surprising feedback improves later memory

The hypercorrection effect is the finding that high-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected after feedback than are low-confidence errors (Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001). In two experiments, we explored the idea that the hypercorrection effect results from increased attention to surprising feedback. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to remember the appearance of the presented feedback when the feedback did not match expectations. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect using more distinctive sources and also demonstrated the hypercorrection effect in this modified paradigm. Overall, participants better remembered both the surface features and the content of surprising feedback.

Neural basis for recognition confidence in younger and older adults.

Although several studies have examined the neural basis for age-related changes in objective memory performance, less is known about how the process of memory monitoring changes with aging. The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine retrospective confidence in memory performance in aging. During low confidence, both younger and older adults showed behavioral evidence that they were guessing during recognition and that they were aware they were guessing when making confidence judgments. Similarly, both younger and older adults showed increased neural activity during low- compared to high-confidence responses in the lateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and left intraparietal sulcus. In contrast, older adults showed more high-confidence errors than younger adults. Younger adults showed greater activity for high compared to low confidence in medial temporal lobe structures, but older adults did not show this pattern. Taken together, these findings may suggest that impairments in the confidence-accuracy relationship for memory in older adults, which are often driven by high-confidence errors, may be primarily related to altered neural signals associated with greater activity for high-confidence responses.

Aging, metamemory, and high-confidence errors: A misrecollection account.

Two experiments showed that older adults were worse than younger adults at judging the accuracy of their responses on source identification (i.e., who said what) and cued-recall tests. It is important to note that this age-related metamonitoring impairment occurred even after older and younger adults were matched on overall source accuracy and cued-recall accuracy. By contrast, older and younger adults showed comparable metamonitoring capacities when assessing the likely accuracy of old-new recognition judgments and responses to questions about general knowledge. These experiments are consistent with the misrecollection account of cognitive aging, which suggests that age-related memory impairments are due to older adults' vulnerability to making high-confidence errors when answering questions that require memory for specific details about recently learned events.