Metamemory and processing fluency

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Monika Undorf
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2014 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262195733

Humans possess the striking reflexive capacity to monitor and control their own learning and retrieval. Recently, the impact of the ease of processing stimuli during learning (processing fluency) on metamemory has been a topic of much debate. Our previous research provided three important findings. First, experimental, statistical, and model-based approaches have converged on the conclusion that fluency is an important factor in predictions of future memory performance (judgments of learning, JOLs. Second, we have found that a commonly used measure of fluency - self-paced study time - is affected by strategic study time allocation (Undorf & Ackerman, in press). This indicates that study time is not a pure measure of fluency. Finally, we have revealed that fluency impacts not only JOLs for oneself (Self JOLs) but also JOLs for another participant (Other JOLs), which are often used to investigate fluency effects. On the basis of these results, we focus on two important questions: 1) Do previous findings provide compelling evidence for fluency effects on JOLs or can explicitly held, deliberately used metacognitive beliefs account for these results? 2) Do Self JOLs but not Other JOLs rely on an attribution process that attributes variations in study time to fluency and strategic study time allocation? Addressing these issues will continue to enhance the scientific knowledge about metamemory and produce practical recommendations on how to improve metacognitive monitoring.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants