CONFIDENCE IN RECALL IN PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

The problem of estimating the accuracy of ones own recollections was investigated in four experiments under a variety of conditions. Subjects were shown a series of paired words; then they were shown the first member of the pairs and asked to recall the second member of each. Along with each attempt at recall the subjects were asked to give a confidence rating on a scale from 1 to 5. In all, 180 subjects were tested for a total 11,200 trials. The confidence results are highly significant, indicating that subjects were able to discriminate their correct recollections from mere guesses. Comparisons are presented showing how realism of confidence varies over the main experimental treatments: variations in meaningfulness of material, one versus two exposures to paired-associate lists, and presence of varying amounts of irrelevant material in the acquisition lists.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1967
Accession Number
AD0655349

Entities

People

  • Elizabeth H. Nicol
  • Francis M. Farrell
  • Thorton B. Roby

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Accuracy
  • Acquisition
  • Agreements
  • Air Force
  • Command And Control
  • Command And Control Systems
  • Contrast
  • Control Systems
  • Government Procurement
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Judgment
  • Learning
  • Materials
  • New York
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation