Abstract
This experimental study examined whether the uninformative anchoring effect, which should be ignored, on judgments of learning (JOLs) was eliminated through the learning experience. In the experiments, the participants were asked to predict whether their performance on an upcoming test would be higher or lower than the anchor value (80% in the high anchor condition or 20% in the low anchor condition) before learning. Experiments 1a and 1b obtained consistent results, regardless of item difficulty. Specifically, the results showed that both the pre- and post-study JOLs in the high anchor condition were higher than those in the low anchor condition. Further, participants in the high (vs. low) anchor conditions made higher item-by-item JOLs during the learning process. This anchoring effect was maintained throughout the learning process. In contrast, there was no significant difference in recall performance between the two conditions. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the uninformative anchoring effect was not eliminated by obtaining test experience through a practice task before presenting anchoring information. These findings suggest that uninformative anchoring biases JOLs, but its effects are not eliminated by the learning experience.
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Data availability
All data associated with this study are publicly available on OSF and can be accessed at https://osf.io/6zrpg/.
Notes
Exact means, standard deviations and 95% CIs of variables represented in Figures are reported in the Appendix.
Previous research showed that the analysis using aggregate data, such as item-by-item JOLs, can mask variability attributable to individuals and underestimate the true effect (Rouder & Lu, 2005). Given this fact, this study conducted additional analysis for item-by-item JOLs adopting a linear mixed effect model approach including the differences between participants and word pairs as random effects (for details, see Supplementary material), thereby demonstrating the anchoring effect on JOLs.
Additional analysis for item-by-item JOLs adopting a linear mixed effect model approach including the differences between participants and word pairs as random effects also showed a linear trend for the serial position effect (for details, see Supplementary material).
Although the results of global JOLs (i.e., pre- and post-study JOLs) and item-by-item JOLs was inconsistent, it is common to observe a disconnection between global post-study JOL and item-by-item JOLs (e.g., Hertzog et al., 2009).
In this additional analysis, the anchor condition was coded as the low anchor condition = –0.5 and the high anchor condition = 0.5, and recall performance in the practice task was centralized. The effects of the anchor condition and the performance in the practice task were significant, β = 10.33, 95% CI [2.08, 18.57], p = .02 and β = 0.46, 95% CI [0.32, 0.59], p < .001, respectively.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI, Grant Number 22K03089 (to Kenji Ikeda).
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Ikeda, K. Uninformative anchoring effect in judgments of learning. Metacognition Learning 18, 527–548 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-023-09339-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-023-09339-w