The feeling of knowing for different types of retrieval failure

The major kinds of retrieval failure during attempts at recall are omission errors and commission errors. The relationship between these retrieval failures and the feeling of knowing is examined here in two ways. First, a systematic review of the literature shows that previous feeling-of-knowing studies differed in how they treated omission errors versus commission errors. Second, data from three new experiments show that this difference has empirical ramifications: The feeling of knowing is greater for commission-error items than for omission-error items, but subsequent recognition is equivalent for the two kinds of items. Hence, one source of the inaccuracy of feeling-of-knowing predictions is now isolated, namely, different kinds of retrieval failure affect the feeling of knowing but not the subsequent performance that the feeling of knowing is attempting to predict. A methodological implication is that independent variables which are presumed to have direct effects on the feeling of knowing may be having only indirect effects via an influence on the ratio of commission errors to omission errors. Several theoretical mechanisms that could underlie the effect are discussed.