The anchoring effect in metamemory monitoring

Judgments about future memory performance (metamemory judgments) are known to be susceptible to illusions and bias. Here we asked whether metamemory judgments are affected, like many other forms of judgment, by numerical anchors. Experiment 1 confirmed previous research showing an effect of informative anchors (e.g., past peer performance) on metamemory monitoring. In four further experiments, we then explored the effects of uninformative anchors. All of the experiments obtained significant anchoring effects on metamemory monitoring; in contrast, the anchors had no effect on recall itself. We also explored the anchoring effect on metamemory control (restudy choices) in Experiment 4. The results suggested that anchors can affect metamemory monitoring, which in turn affects metamemory control. The present research reveals that informative and, more importantly, uninformative numbers that have no influence on recall itself can bias metamemory judgments. On the basis of the current theoretical understanding of the anchoring effect and metamemory monitoring, these results offer insight into the processes that trigger metacognitive biases.     

Revelation effect in metamemory

Test items are more likely to be judged as previously studied if they need to be discovered before the recognition decision. In the present experiments, this revelation effect was extended to metamemory judgments. Participants studied word pairs and then tried to recall the second word of each pair when given the first word as a cue. In Experiment 1, a fragment of the target was either gradually increased in size or held constant, and in Experiment 2, sometimes an anagram of the cue was given instead of the cue itself. Thus, for some items, there was a revelation task before a recall attempt. If recall failed, the participants gave feeling-of-knowing (FOK) ratings. In both experiments, the participants gave higher FOK ratings after a revelation task, even though the items that these FOKs referred to remained unrecalled. Analyses showed a criterion shift but no differences in sensitivity.     

The effect of text coherence and modality on metamemory judgements

This study examined the effects of text coherence and modality on the metamemory judgements of Ease of Learning (EOL) and Judgement of Learning (JOL), and on the object-level measure of recall. Previous work found that sentence material set in a coherent, ordered text context was not judged as more memorable than that presented in a context of sentences in a disordered sequence, even though an ordered sequence helped recall (Shaddock & Carroll, 1997). The current study modified Shaddock and Carroll's design by changing the texts used from expository to narrative text. The metamemory judgements and recall were now found to be significantly more sensitive to material learned in an ordered sequence than to material learned in a disordered sequence. Also, JOLs and recall were more sensitive to material that was originally learned in an auditory mode (spoken presentation) than in a visual mode (verbal presentation). The results are discussed in terms of a cue-utilisation approach to metamemory judgements.     

The wolfpack effect. Perception of animacy irresistibly influences interactive behavior

Imagine a pack of predators stalking their prey. The predators may not always move directly toward their target (e.g., when circling around it), but they may be consistently facing toward it. The human visual system appears to be extremely sensitive to such situations, even in displays involving simple shapes. We demonstrate this by introducing the wolfpack effect, which is found when several randomly moving, oriented shapes (darts, or discs with "eyes") consistently point toward a moving disc. Despite the randomness of the shapes' movement, they seem to interact with the disc--as if they are collectively pursuing it. This impairs performance in interactive tasks (including detection of actual pursuit), and observers selectively avoid such shapes when moving a disc through the display themselves. These and other results reveal that the wolfpack effect is a novel "social" cue to perceived animacy. And, whereas previous work has focused on the causes of perceived animacy, these results demonstrate its effects, showing how it irresistibly and implicitly shapes visual performance and interactive behavior.     

汉语主、宾关系从句加工难度及其核心名词生命性效应

采用眼动追踪实验技术,考查了核心名词生命性取向对汉语主、宾关系从句加工难度调节效应。结果显示:(1)核心名词生命性格局对汉语主、宾关系从句的加工难度有着显著调节作用,具体表现为:当主、从句中的核心名词为"生命性-非生命性"格局时,在主句核心名词、核心动词位置,宾语关系从句加工较为容易;当主、从句中的核心名词为"非生命性-生命性"格局时,在上述位置,两种关系从句加工难度差异不显著;(2)汉语主、宾关系从句加工中核心名词生命性效应主要发生在语义信息提取、论元关系建构阶段,体现出汉语语言的特异性。上述结果支持了题元切适性理论。     

The role of animacy in spatial transformations

We present evidence that different mental spatial transformations are used to reason about three different types of items representing a spectrum of animacy: human bodies, nonhuman animals, and inanimate objects. Participants made two different judgments about rotated figures: handedness judgments (“Is this the left or right side?”) and matching judgments (“Are these figures the same?”). Perspective-taking strategies were most prevalent when participants made handedness judgments about human bodies and animals. In contrast, participants generally did not imagine changes in perspective to perform matching judgments. Such results suggest that high-level information about semantic categories, including information about a thing’s animacy, can influence how spatial representations are transformed when performing online problem solving. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

The impact of object animacy on the appraisal of causality

The goal of this study was to examine whether animacy of objects affected the appraisal of a causal relationship when one object was observed to propel the other either immediately, after a delay, or at a distance. Participants rated the degree of causal interaction either before or after an extended experience with observing the interactions. We expected that spatial distance would have little effect when objects were seen as animate (because social interactions often span spatial gaps) and would have a degrading effect when objects were appraised as inanimate. Motion animacy appeared to attenuate the impact of a gap and to decrease initial causal judgments for direct collisions. Explicitly informing participants about the nature of the objects had a strong impact. Experience with the causal task affected ratings to a greater extent when the objects were explicitly described as nonliving rather than living.     

The effect of noun animacy on the processing of unambiguous sentences: evidence from French relative clauses

Two experiments, one using self-paced reading and one using eye tracking, investigated the influence of noun animacy on the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses, object relative (OR) clauses, and object relative clauses with stylistic inversion (OR-SI) in French. Each sentence type was presented in two versions: either with an animate relative clause (RC) subject and an inanimate object (AS/IO), or with an inanimate RC subject and an animate object (IS/AO). There was an interaction between the RC structure and noun animacy. The advantage of SR sentences over OR and OR-SI sentences disappeared in AS/IO sentences. The interaction between animacy and structure occurred in self-paced reading times and in total fixation times on the RCs, but not in first-pass reading times. The results are consistent with a late interaction between animacy and structural processing during parsing and provide data relevant to several models of parsing.     

元记忆监测研究的横向比较

元记忆监测在记忆活动中发挥重要作用。元记忆自FOK研究开始,到理论框架的提出,各种理论逐渐发展成熟。文章从元记忆监测总过程的视角对近年来EOL、FOK、JOL、JOC等元记忆监测成分的研究范式、认知机制及神经机制进行了横向比较,概述了元记忆监测研究的进展及动态。     

The effect of noun animacy on the processing of unambiguous sentences: Evidence from French relative clauses

It has previously been shown that moving images are remembered better than static ones. In two experiments, we investigated the basis for this dynamic superiority effect. Participants studied scenes presented as a single static image, a sequence of still images, or a moving video clip, and 3 days later completed a recognition test in which familiar and novel scenes were presented in all three formats. We found a marked congruency effect: For a given study format, accuracy was highest when test items were shown in the same format. Neither the dynamic superiority effect nor the study–test congruency effect was affected by encoding (Experiment 1) or retrieval (Experiment 2) manipulations, suggesting that these effects are relatively impervious to strategic control. The results demonstrate that the spatio-temporal properties of complex, realistic scenes are preserved in long-term memory.     

The influence of near-threshold priming on metamemory and recall

A metamemory paradigm involving the use of near-threshold visual priming is developed in which a brief flash of a previously nonrecalled answer occurs, and then the person attempts to recall the answer and/or make feeling-of-knowing judgments. The major new finding is that the feeling of knowing did not detect perceptual input from a near-threshold prime that increased the recall of otherwise nonrecallable items. This finding has two important implications: (1) The feeling of knowing is not always more sensitive than recall as an indicant of information in memory (particularly, as an indicant of small amounts of information newly deposited into memory), and (2) 'monitored' information (that the feeling of knowing would be capable of detecting, as examined in previous research) can be combined with 'nonmonitored' information (that is newly deposited into memory and that the feeling of knowing does not detect) so as to produce the successful recall of an otherwise nonrecallable item.     

Adaptive memory: longevity and learning intentionality of the animacy effect

The animacy effect—the finding that animates are better remembered than inanimates—is proving to be a robust empirical phenomenon. Considering the adaptiveness of the animate advantage, one might expect it to remain after long retention intervals and also to be present irrespectively of an intention to learn. The present study explores these two aspects. Different groups of participants learned (intentional learning) or rated the pleasantness (incidental learning) of animate and inanimate words; memory was tested immediately or after a 48?h delay. A significant animacy effect was obtained after both retention intervals and in both learning conditions. Two significant interactions revealed a larger animacy effect, as well as a larger effect of the retention interval, when learning was incidental. Our findings reinforce the robustness of the animacy effect and provide some insight into possible proximate mechanisms of the effect.     

The contribution of metamemory deficits to schizophrenia

A number of recent studies have demonstrated that individuals with schizophrenia display knowledge corruption; that is, they hold false information with strong conviction. This aberration in metamemory is thought to stem from poor memory accuracy in conjunction with impaired discrimination of correct and incorrect judgments in terms of confidence. Thirty-one participants with schizophrenia, along with 61 healthy control participants and 48 control participants with other psychiatric conditions, participated in a computerized source memory task. Whereas no differences in memory accuracy were observed between the group with schizophrenia and the group with other psychiatric diagnoses, knowledge corruption was specifically impaired in those with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia participants showed a significantly decreased confidence gap: They were more confident in errors and less confident in correct responses relative to those in the control groups. Knowledge corruption is theorized to be a potential risk factor for the emergence of delusions.     

Infants' concept of animacy

Nine- and 12-month-old infants' concept of animacy was investigated by exposing them to autonomous motion by an animate and by an inanimate object in a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, increases in negative affect in comparison to a baseline condition were taken to indicate that children considered an event to be anomalous. Results showed that 12-month-old infants consider self-propulsion by a small robot to be anomalous, but not self-propulsion by a human stranger. Experiment 2 indicated that 9- and 12-month-old infants expressed similar affective reactions when the robot's motion was contingent on verbal commands given by the mother, suggesting that these children are aware that it is not appropriate for an inanimate object's movements to be contingent on events occuring at a distance. The third experiment was designed to rule out the possibility that the infants' reactions in Experiment 2 were a function of the incongruity of the mother's behavior rather than due to the violation of the infant's concept of animacy. In this experiment, 12-month-olds' levels of attentiveness are increased when the robot obeyed verbal commands but not when a human stranger did so. These results suggest that infants discriminate animate from inanimate objects on the basis of motion cues by the age of 9 months.     

When knowing more means less: the effect of fan on metamemory judgments

The authors used a "fan" paradigm (J. R. Anderson, 1974) to test the accessibility and competition models of metamemory using judgments of learning (JOLs). JOLs in this study reflect one's confidence level in subsequently recognizing newly learned material. The number of facts, or "fan," associated with JOL-queried concepts varied from 1 to 3 associates. Results of 3 experiments indicated that as the level of fan increased, the magnitude of JOLs decreased. This finding was observed even when the fan effect (i.e., slower recognition as number of facts increase) was attenuated on a verification task in 2 of the experiments by manipulating the organization of the multiple concepts. The results supported the competition hypothesis (T. A. Schreiber, 1998; T. A. Schreiber & D. L. Nelson, 1998) as an important determinant of JOLs.     

Parametric induction of animacy experience

Graphical displays of simple moving geometrical figures have been repeatedly used to study the attribution of animacy in human observers. Yet little is known about the relevant movement characteristics responsible for this experience. The present study introduces a novel parametric research paradigm, which allows for the experimental control of specific motion parameters and a predictable influence on the attribution of animacy. Two experiments were conducted using 3D computer animations of one or two objects systematically introducing variations in the following aspects of motion: directionality, discontinuity and responsiveness. Both experiments further varied temporal kinematics. Results showed that animacy experience increased with the time a moving object paused in the vicinity of a second object and with increasing complexity of interaction between the objects (approach and responsiveness). The experience of animacy could be successfully modulated in a parametric fashion by the systematic variation of comparably simple differential movement characteristics.     

Perceptual causality and animacy

Certain simple visual displays consisting of moving 2-D geometric shapes can give rise to percepts with high-level properties such as causality and animacy. This article reviews recent research on such phenomena, which began with the classic work of Michotte and of Heider and Simmel. The importance of such phenomena stems in part from the fact that these interpretations seem to be largely perceptual in nature - to be fairly fast, automatic, irresistible and highly stimulus driven - despite the fact that they involve impressions typically associated with higher-level cognitive processing. This research suggests that just as the visual system works to recover the physical structure of the world by inferring properties such as 3-D shape, so too does it work to recover the causal and social structure of the world by inferring properties such as causality and animacy.     

The effects of distinctiveness on memory and metamemory for face-name associations

We examined the influence of face and name distinctiveness on memory and metamemory for face-name associations. Four types of monitoring judgements were solicited during encoding and retrieval of face-name pairs that contained distinct or typical faces (Experiment 1) or names (Experiment 2). The beneficial effects of distinctiveness on associative memory were symmetrical between faces and names, such that relative to their typical counterparts, distinct faces enhanced memory for names, and distinct names enhanced memory for faces. These effects were also apparent in metamemory. Estimates of prospective and retrospective memory performance were greater for face-name associations that contained a distinct face or name compared with a typical face or name, regardless of whether the distinct item was a cue or target. Moreover, the predictive validity of prospective monitoring improved with name distinctiveness, whereas the predictive validity of retrospective monitoring improved with facial distinctiveness. Our results indicate that distinctiveness affects not only the strength of the association between a face and a name, but also the ability to monitor that association.     

Target animacy influences chimpanzee handedness

We employed a bottom-up, quantitative method to investigate great ape handedness. Our previous investigation of gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) demonstrated that contextual information influenced an individual’s handedness toward target objects. Specifically, we found a significant right-hand bias for unimanual actions directed toward inanimate target objects but not for actions directed to animate target objects (Forrester et al. in Anim Cogn 14(6):903–907, 2011). Using the identical methodological technique, we investigated the spontaneous hand actions of nine captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) during naturalistic, spontaneous behavior. We assessed both the frequencies and proportions of lateralized hand actions directed toward animate and inanimate targets employing focal follow video sampling. Like the gorillas, the chimpanzees demonstrated a right-handed bias for actions directed toward inanimate targets, but not toward animate targets. This pattern was evident at the group level and for the majority of subjects at the individual level. We postulate that a right-hand bias for only inanimate targets reflects the left hemisphere’s dominant neural processing capabilities for objects that have functional properties (inanimate objects). We further speculate that a population-level right-hand bias is not a human-unique characteristic, but one that was inherited from a common human-ape ancestor.