Abstract
Knowledge updating occurs when people learn about the impacts of variables on memory after experiencing their effects. For instance, judgments of learning (JOLs) for encoding strategies (e.g., imagery and repetition) show no difference during a first study–test trial; however, during a second trial, JOLs better reflect the benefits of the more effective strategy. Although this outcome indicates some knowledge updating, JOLs on a second trial rarely update to reflect the full impact of a given variable. We investigated several explanations for this incomplete updating. Evidence using prestudy JOLs from Experiments 1 and 2 disconfirmed the encoding-disrupts-updating (EDU) hypothesis, which is that the experience of encoding items on the second trial disrupts the use of new knowledge in making JOLs. In Experiment 3, we used binary JOLs to evaluate whether the lack of updating is an artifact of people not wanting to use extreme ratings, which accounted for some—but not all—of the incomplete updating. Finally, in Experiment 4, immediately after the test on the initial trial, participants received feedback about how many items they had recalled for each level of the focal variable, and their JOLs on the second trial still showed incomplete updating. Taken together, the evidence suggests that incomplete knowledge updating on JOLs arises from multiple factors, including a scaling artifact and the deficient use of accurate knowledge when making JOLs.
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Notes
This version of the EDU hypothesis—in which encoding experiences overshadow new knowledge—can explain incomplete updating, and hence it is our focus here. However, it is possible that encoding experiences on the second trial could reinforce knowledge about the strategies learned on the first trial, which would predict that prestudy JOLs would show less updating. The evidence from the present experiments is inconsistent with this hypothesis, so we do not consider it further.
Two details of this experiment are worth noting. First, we removed six participants from the sample for responding on the JOL scale from 0 to 10, instead of 0 to 100, for the first trial. This invalid responding was likely a carryover from the PEP questionnaire instructions, which had participants make ratings of strategy effectiveness on a scale from 1 to 10. Second, two pairs had the same target words. Removing these pairs, however, did not change the results; therefore, data based on the original set of 60 pairs were analyzed.
Analysis of relative accuracy was relevant to evaluating the EDU hypothesis and not relevant to evaluating the remaining hypotheses. Thus, for brevity, we will no longer highlight relative accuracy, but we do provide the relevant gamma correlations for Experiments 3 and 4 in Table 2.
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Author note
We thank Melissa Bishop for her assistance with data collection. This research was supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative in Bridging Brain, Mind, and Behavior Collaborative Award.
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Mueller, M.L., Dunlosky, J. & Tauber, S.K. Why is knowledge updating after task experience incomplete? Contributions of encoding experience, scaling artifact, and inferential deficit. Mem Cogn 43, 180–192 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-014-0474-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-014-0474-2