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.     

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.     

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.     

The hypercorrection effect in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT

The hypercorrection effect, which refers to the finding that errors committed with high confidence are more likely to be corrected than are low confidence errors, has been replicated many times, and with both young adults and children. In the present study, we contrasted older with younger adults. Participants answered general-information questions, made confidence ratings about their answers, were given corrective feedback, and then were retested on questions that they had gotten wrong. While younger adults showed the hypercorrection effect, older adults, despite higher overall accuracy on the general-information questions and excellent basic metacognitive ability, showed a diminished hypercorrection effect. Indeed, the correspondence between their confidence in their errors and the probability of correction was not significantly greater than zero, showing, for the first time, that a particular participant population is selectively impaired on this error correction task. These results potentially offer leverage both on the mechanisms underlying the hypercorrection effect and on reasons for older adults’ memory impairments, as well as on memory functions that are spared.     

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.     

Hypercorrection of high-confidence errors in the classroom

People often have erroneous knowledge about the world that is firmly entrenched in memory and endorsed with high confidence. Although strong errors in memory would seem difficult to “un-learn,” evidence suggests that errors are more likely to be corrected through feedback when they are originally endorsed with high confidence compared to low confidence. This hypercorrection effect has been predominantly studied in laboratory settings with general knowledge (i.e., trivia) questions, however, and has not been systematically explored in authentic classroom contexts. In the current study, college students in an introductory horticulture class answered questions about the course content, rated their confidence in their answers, received feedback of the correct answers, and then later completed a posttest. Results revealed a significant hypercorrection effect, along with a tendency for students with higher prior knowledge of the material to express higher confidence in, and in turn more effective correction of, their error responses.     

Correcting a metacognitive error: feedback increases retention of low-confidence correct responses

Previous studies investigating posttest feedback have generally conceptualized feedback as a method for correcting erroneous responses, giving virtually no consideration to how feedback might promote learning of correct responses. Here, the authors show that when correct responses are made with low confidence, feedback serves to correct this initial metacognitive error, enhancing retention of low-confidence correct responses. In 2 experiments, subjects took an initial multiple-choice test on general knowledge facts and made a confidence judgment after each response. Feedback was provided for half of the questions, and retention was assessed by a final cued-recall test. Taking the initial test improved retention relative to not testing, and feedback further enhanced performance. Consistent with prior research, feedback improved retention by allowing subjects to correct initially erroneous responses. Of more importance, feedback also doubled the retention of correct low-confidence responses, relative to providing no feedback. The function of feedback is to correct both memory errors and metacognitive errors.     

Prior knowledge is more predictive of error correction than subjective confidence

Previous research has demonstrated that, when given feedback, participants are more likely to correct confidently-held errors, as compared with errors held with lower levels of confidence, a finding termed the hypercorrection effect. Accounts of hypercorrection suggest that confidence modifies attention to feedback; alternatively, hypercorrection may reflect prior domain knowledge, with confidence ratings simply correlated with this prior knowledge. In the present experiments, we attempted to adjudicate among these explanations of the hypercorrection effect. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants answered general knowledge questions, rated their confidence, and received feedback either immediately after rating their confidence or after a delay of several minutes. Although memory for confidence judgments should have been poorer at a delay, the hypercorrection effect was equivalent for both feedback timings. Experiment 2 showed that hypercorrection remained unchanged even when the delay to feedback was increased. In addition, measures of recall for prior confidence judgments showed that memory for confidence was indeed poorer after a delay. Experiment 3 directly compared estimates of domain knowledge with confidence ratings, showing that such prior knowledge was related to error correction, whereas the unique role of confidence was small. Overall, our results suggest that prior knowledge likely plays a primary role in error correction, while confidence may play a small role or merely serve as a proxy for prior knowledge.     

Strong memories are hard to scale

People are generally skilled at using a confidence scale to rate the strength of their memories over a wide range. Specifically, low-confidence recognition decisions are often associated with close-to-chance accuracy, whereas high-confidence recognition decisions can be associated with close-to-perfect accuracy. However, using a 20-point rating scale, the authors found that the ability to scale memory strength had its limitations in that a high proportion of list items received the highest rating of 20. Efforts to induce participants to differentiate between these strong memories using emphatic instructions and alternative scales were not successful. Remember/know judgments indicated that these strong and hard-to-scale memories were often based on familiarity (not just recollection). Providing error feedback on a plurals discrimination task finally produced a high-confidence criterion shift. The authors suggest that the ability to scale strong (and almost perfectly accurate) memories may be limited because of the absence of differential error feedback for very strong memories in the past (the kind of differential error feedback that may account for the memory-scaling expertise that participants otherwise exhibit).     

Scaffolding feedback to maximize long-term error correction

Scaffolded feedback was tested against three other feedback presentation methods (standard corrective feedback, minimal feedback, and answer-until-correct multiple-choice feedback) over both short- and long-term retention intervals in order to assess which method would produce the most robust gains in error correction. Scaffolded feedback was a method designed to take advantage of the benefits of retrieval practice by providing incremental hints until the correct answer could be self-generated. In Experiments 1 and 3, on an immediate test, final memory for the correct answer was lowest for questions given minimal feedback, moderate for the answer-until-correct condition, and equally high in the scaffolded feedback condition and the standard feedback condition. However, tests of the maintenance of the corrections over a 30-min delay (Experiment 2) and over a 1-day delay (Experiment 3) demonstrated that scaffolded feedback gave rise to the best memory for the correct answers at a delay.     

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.     

Imagery of errors in typing

Using a typing task we investigated whether insufficient imagination of errors and error corrections is related to duration differences between execution and imagination. In Experiment 1 spontaneous error imagination was investigated, whereas in Experiment 2 participants were specifically instructed to imagine errors. Further, in Experiment 2 we manipulated correction instructions (whether or not to correct errors) and controlled for visual feedback in executed typing (letters appearing on the screen or not). Participants executed and imagined typing proverbs of different lengths. Errors and error corrections explained a significant amount of variance of execution minus imagination differences in Experiment 1, and in Experiment 2 when participants were instructed to correct errors, but not when participants were instructed not to correct errors. In Experiment 2 participants corrected and reported more errors with than without visual feedback. However, the relation between execution − imagination duration differences and errors and error corrections was unaffected by visual feedback. The types of errors reported less often in imagination than in execution were related to processes in typing execution. We conclude that errors and error corrections are not spontaneously imagined during motor imagery, and that even when attention is drawn to their occurrence only some are imagined. This may be due to forward models not predicting all aspects of an action, imprecise forward models, or a neglect of monitoring error signals during motor imagery.     

Learning to diminish the effects of proactive interference: Reducing false memory for young and older adults

Results from two experiments revealed that prior experience with proactive interference (PI) diminished PI’s effects for both young and older adults. Participants were given two rounds of experience, with different materials, in a situation that produced PI. Comparisons with a control condition showed that the effects of PI on accuracy and on high-confidence intrusion errors (false memory) were reduced on the second round, as compared with those on the first. Also, the ability of confidence to diagnose accuracy of responding improved across rounds. Effects of prior experience with PI depended on feedback given at the time of test (Experiment 1). At least in part, the diminishment of PI resulted from participants’ allocating more attention to interference items during study in the second round than in the first (Experiment 2). Implications of the results for interpreting age differences in PI and false memory are discussed.     

Monitoring memory errors: the influence of the veracity of retrieved information on the accuracy of judgements of learning

The current study examined the degree to which predictions of memory performance made immediately or at a delay are sensitive to confidently held memory illusions. Participants studied unrelated pairs of words and made judgements of learning (JOLs) for each item, either immediately or after a delay. Half of the unrelated pairs (deceptive items; e.g., nurse-dollar) had a semantically related competitor (e.g., doctor) that was easily accessible when given a test cue (e.g., nurse-do_ _ _r) and half had no semantically related competitor (control items; e.g., subject-dollar). Following the study phase, participants were administered a cued recall test. Results from Experiment 1 showed that memory performance was less accurate for deceptive compared with control items. In addition, delaying judgement improved the relative accuracy of JOLs for control items but not for deceptive items. Subsequent experiments explored the degree to which the relative accuracy of delayed JOLs for deceptive items improved as a result of a warning to ensure that retrieved memories were accurate (Experiment 2) and corrective feedback regarding the veracity of information retrieved prior to making a JOL (Experiment 3). In all, these data suggest that delayed JOLs may be largely insensitive to memory errors unless participants are provided with feedback regarding memory accuracy.     

Feedback-related brain activity predicts learning from feedback in multiple-choice testing

Different event-related potentials (ERPs) have been shown to correlate with learning from feedback in decision-making tasks and with learning in explicit memory tasks. In the present study, we investigated which ERPs predict learning from corrective feedback in a multiple-choice test, which combines elements from both paradigms. Participants worked through sets of multiple-choice items of a Swahili–German vocabulary task. Whereas the initial presentation of an item required the participants to guess the answer, corrective feedback could be used to learn the correct response. Initial analyses revealed that corrective feedback elicited components related to reinforcement learning (FRN), as well as to explicit memory processing (P300) and attention (early frontal positivity). However, only the P300 and early frontal positivity were positively correlated with successful learning from corrective feedback, whereas the FRN was even larger when learning failed. These results suggest that learning from corrective feedback crucially relies on explicit memory processing and attentional orienting to corrective feedback, rather than on reinforcement learning.     

Remembering and Knowing: Using another’s subjective report to make inferences about memory strength and subjective experience

The Remember–Know paradigm is commonly used to examine experiential states during recognition. In this paradigm, whether a Know response is defined as a high-confidence state of certainty or a low-confidence state based on familiarity varies across researchers, and differences in definitions and instructions have been shown to influence participants’ responding. Using a novel approach, in three internet-based questionnaires participants were placed in the role of ‘memory expert’ and classified others’ justifications of recognition decisions. Results demonstrated that participants reliably differentiated between others’ memory experiences – both in terms of confidence and other inherent differences in the justifications. Furthermore, under certain conditions, manipulations of confidence were found to shift how items were assigned to subjective experience categories (Remember, Know, Familiar, and Guess). Findings are discussed in relation to the relationship between subjective experience and confidence, and the separation of Know and Familiar response categories within the Remember–Know paradigm.     

Principles of cognitive science in education: The effects of generation,errors, and feedback

Principles of cognitive science hold the promise of helping children to study more effectively, yet they do not always make successful transitions from the laboratory to applied settings and have rarely been tested in such settings. For example, self-generation of answers to questions should help children to remember. But what if children cannot generate anything? And what if they make an error? Do these deviations from the laboratory norm of perfect generation hurt, and, if so, do they hurt enough that one should, in practice, spurn generation? Can feedback compensate, or are errors catastrophic? The studies reviewed here address three interlocking questions in an effort to better implement a computer-based study program to help children learn: (1) Does generation help? (2) Do errors hurt if they are corrected? And (3) what is the effect of feedback? The answers to these questions are: Yes, generation helps; no, surprisingly, errors that are corrected do not hurt; and, finally, feedback is beneficial in verbal learning. These answers may help put cognitive scientists in a better position to put their well-established principles in the service of children’s learning.     

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.     

Control of Rapid Arm Movements When Target Position Is Altered During Saccadic Suppression

This experiment examined whether rapid arm movements can be corrected in response to a change in target position that occurs just prior to movement onset, during saccadic suppression of displacement. Because the threshold of retinal input reaches its highest magnitude at that time, displacement of the visual target of a saccade is not perceived. Subjects (N = 6) were instructed to perform very rapid arm movements toward visual targets located 16, 20, and 24 degrees from midline (on average, movement time was 208 ms). On some trials the 20 degrees target was displaced 4 degrees either to the right or to the left during saccadic suppression. For double-step trials, arm movements did not deviate from their original trajectory. Movement endpoints and movement structure (i.e., velocity-and acceleration-time profiles) were similar whether or not target displacements occurred, showing the failure of proprioceptive signals or internal feedback loops to correct the arm trajectory. Following this movement, terminal spatially oriented movements corrected the direction of the initial movement (as compared with the single-step control trials) when the target eccentricity decreased by 4 degrees. Subjects were unaware of these spatial corrections. Therefore, spatial corrections of hand position were driven by the goal level of the task, which was updated by oculomotor corrective responses when a target shift occurred.