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First- and second-order metacognitive judgments of semantic memory reports: The influence of personality traits and cognitive styles

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Abstract

In learning contexts, people need to make realistic confidence judgments about their memory performance. The present study investigated whether second-order judgments of first-order confidence judgments could help people improve their confidence judgments of semantic memory information. Furthermore, we assessed whether different personality and cognitive style constructs help explain differences in this ability. Participants answered 40 general knowledge questions and rated how confident they were that they had answered each question correctly. They were then asked to adjust the confidence judgments they believed to be most unrealistic, thus making second-order judgments of their first-order judgments. As a group, the participants did not increase the realism of their confidence judgments, but they did significantly increase their confidence for correct items. Furthermore, participants scoring high on an openness composite were more likely to display higher confidence after both the first- and second-order judgments. Moreover, participants scoring high on the openness and the extraversion composites were more likely to display higher levels of overconfidence after both the first- and second-order judgments. In general, however, personality and cognitive style factors showed only a weak relationship with the ability to modify the most unrealistic confidence judgments. Finally, the results showed no evidence that personality and cognitive style supported first- and second-order judgments differently.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that there are some constraints to this correlation since the number of adjustments varied a lot between participants. Also correlations could not be calculated for participants that did not choose to do any adjustments.

  2. The results with respect to the Need for Cognition scale are, although novel (for example, it was not included in the Kleitman 2008 study), consistent with the nature of this factor.

  3. 94 participants were left in the analysis for correct answers and 121 participants in the analysis for incorrect answers.

  4. This analysis was done only for the participants who had more than 5 unrealistic items when calculating both the correct and incorrect ratio; thus, these correlations consist of 75 participants.

  5. We did not control for the accuracy of performance because such control will be redundant given that confidence levels were split on the basis of the correctly and incorrectly answered items.

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Acknowledgment

This research was partially supported by a grant given to the second author from the Swedish Research Council (VR). Special thanks to the Australian Endeavour Awards for financially supporting the visit of the first author to the University of Sydney. Special thanks to Simon Jackson for excellent suggestions regarding the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Box 500, 40530, Göteborg, Sweden

    Sandra Buratti

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden

    Carl Martin Allwood

  3. School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Sabina Kleitman

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  1. Sandra Buratti
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  2. Carl Martin Allwood
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Correspondence to Sandra Buratti.

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Buratti, S., Allwood, C.M. & Kleitman, S. First- and second-order metacognitive judgments of semantic memory reports: The influence of personality traits and cognitive styles. Metacognition Learning 8, 79–102 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-013-9096-5

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