The relation between level of general knowledge and feeling-of-knowing: An adult age study

Younger and older adults were examined in recall and recognition of factual information varying in datedness. It was found that younger adults performed better for questions related to the time period 1970–1983, while the older adults performed better for questions related to the time period 1930–1950. The subjects also did confidence ratings of their "feeling-of-knowing" of the actual questions. On the basis of the cross-over interaction between age and datedness, the relationship between the level of general knowledge and the ability to monitor the knowledge was investigated. Only minor differences were observed between the graphs describing recall and recognition performance as a function of feeling-of-knowing in the four age by datedness combinations. Thus, the results suggest that the ability to supervise context-free semantic information may be intact despite an inferiority in level of knowledge. Comparisons were made between the results of the present study and those of previous studies on metamemory and episodic remembering.