Two dissociable aspects of feeling-of-knowing: Knowing that you know and knowing that you do not know

Feeling-of-knowing judgement is traditionally regarded as a unitary cognitive process. However, recent research suggests that knowing that you know (positive feeling-of-knowing) and knowing that you do not know (negative feeling-of-knowing) have different neural substrates (Luo, Niki, Ying, & Luo, 2004 Luo, J., Niki, K., Ying, X. P. and Luo, Y. J. 2004. Knowing that you know and knowing that you don't know: A fMRI study on feeling of knowing (FOK). Acta Psychologica Sinica, 36: 426–443.  [Google Scholar]). In the present study, we used a paradigm adapted from Koriat and Levy-Sadot (2001) Koriat, A. and Levy-Sadot, R. 2001. The combined contributions of the cue-familiarity and accessibility heuristics to feelings of knowing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27: 34–53. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] to examine whether positive feeling-of-knowing and negative feeling-of-knowing were mediated by distinct cognitive processes. We found that positive and negative feeling-of-knowing were dissociated during immediate feeling-of-knowing judgements (i.e., preliminary feeling-of-knowing) and delayed feeling-of-knowing judgements (i.e., postretrieval feeling-of-knowing). At the judgement intervals, positive feeling-of-knowing was based on partial recovery of the nonrecalled targets, whereas negative feeling-of-knowing was determined by familiarity with the retrieval cues. Our results suggest that feeling-of-knowing is a heterogeneous process.