The concreteness effect on judgments of learning: Evaluating the contributions of fluency and beliefs

Researchers have often determined how cues influence judgments of learning (JOLs; e.g., concrete words are assigned higher JOLs than are abstract words), and recently there has been an emphasis in understanding why cues influence JOLs (i.e., the mechanisms that underlie cue effects on JOLs). The analytic-processing (AP) theory posits that JOLs are constructed in accordance with participants’ beliefs of how a cue will influence memory. Even so, some evidence suggests that fluency is also important to cue effects on JOLs. In the present experiments, we investigated the contributions of participants’ beliefs and processing fluency to the concreteness effect on JOLs. To evaluate beliefs, participants estimated memory performance in a hypothetical experiment (Experiment 1), and studied concrete and abstract words and made a pre-study JOL for each (Experiments 2 and 3). Participants’ predictions demonstrated the belief that concrete words are more likely to be remembered than are abstract words, consistent with the AP theory. To evaluate fluency, response latencies were measured during lexical decision (Experiment 4), self-paced study (Experiment 5), and mental imagery (Experiment 7). Number of trials to acquisition was also evaluated (Experiment 6). Fluency did not differ between concrete and abstract words in Experiments 5 and 6, and it did not mediate the concreteness effect on JOLs in Experiments 4 and 7. Taken together, these results demonstrate that beliefs are a primary mechanism driving the concreteness effect on JOLs.