مشکل تطبیقی و مقررات استراتژیک دقت: تاثیر آزمون لیست بافتار بر نظارت و متا فراشناخت

A growing body of research has shown that context manipulations can have little or no impact on accuracy performance, yet still significantly influence metacognitive performance. For example, participants in a test-list context paradigm study one list of words with a medium levels-of-processing task and a second word list with either a shallow or deep task: Recognition for medium words does not differ across conditions, however medium words are significantly more likely to be labeled as “remembered” (vs. merely familiar) if they had been studied with a shallow word list (Bodner & Lindsay, 2003). The goal of the current studies was to extend the test-list context paradigm to strategic regulation (report/withhold recognition test), and broaden it to incorporate different types of stimuli (i.e., face stimuli in place of a medium word list). The paradigm also was modified to include separate answer (studied/new) confidence and decision (report/withhold) confidence ratings at test. Results showed that context did not impact recognition accuracy for faces across the context conditions, however participants were more likely to report (i.e., volunteer) their face responses if they had studied the shallow word list. The results also demonstrated a difference between answer confidence and decision confidence, and the pattern of this difference depended on whether responses were reported or withheld (Experiment 1). Overall, the data are presented as support for the functional account of memory, which views memory states as inferential and attributional rather than static categories.

Theories that have been used to explain the underlying mechanisms of recognition memory traditionally have fallen into one of two broad camps – quantitative versus qualitative accounts. Quantitative approaches typically argue that differences in recognition phenomenology (e.g., recollection vs. familiarity) are determined by decisional processes that are based on memory strength. For instance, some quantitative accounts postulate that the same memory traces feed into the different states of recollection and familiarity, but that factors such as trace strength contribute to whether the memory is experienced as one, the other, or both (Dunn, 2004, Dunn, 2008 and Heathcote et al., 2010). Conversely, qualitative approaches tend to focus on the fundamental principle that distinct underlying processes give rise to experiences of recollection and familiarity; that is, the two types of experiences are independent of one another and may occur in isolation or together (Gardiner et al., 1996, Jacoby, 1991 and Jacoby et al., 1997). More recently, though, there has been a shift to a new class of memory models that combines aspects of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. For example, the functional account characterizes both recollection and familiarity as inferential (see McCabe & Balota, 2007, for discussion of the similar expectancy heuristic account). Specifically, the context in which a memory decision is made will impact the outcome, and if the information that you have available about a specific event allows you to make the decision-at-hand (e.g., recognizing a person on the street as your psychology professor) then likely you will judge that you have conscious recollection. However, that same available information in a different context may only support a more general feeling of familiarity (e.g., recognizing that you know a person on the street, but not who they are; Arnold, 2011, Bodner and Lindsay, 2003 and Gruppuso et al., 1997). One key line of research that has lent support to the functional account of memory is Bodner and Lindsay’s (2003) test-list context paradigm. This paradigm requires participants to study two separate lists of words; one list is always studied with a medium levels-of-processing (LOP) task, and the other is studied either with a shallow or deep LOP task. Specifically, for the words on the medium LOP study list participants make a yes/no judgment about whether the word is one people commonly use, whereas for the shallow LOP task they judge whether the word contains the letter ‘a’ and for the deep LOP task they judge whether the word is an item they would want on a deserted island. Participants then complete a remember-know (R-K) judgment recognition test, for which they are instructed that they should use the “remember” (R) label if they are able to bring to mind specific details of having previously encountered a word, whereas the “know” (K) label is for words that do not have accompanying conscious details, but nonetheless feel “old” or familiar. Bodner and Lindsay found that accurate old/new discrimination did not differ for the medium items between the conditions, however participants in the shallow condition were significantly more likely to use the R label for their medium words (i.e., claim conscious recollection) than the participants in the deep condition. Based on their findings, Bodner and Lindsay (2003) argued that it was the context at test that led participants in the shallow condition to use different attributes of the stimuli to define the properties of R and K than participants in the deep condition. For example, the context manipulation created a “comparative difficulty” difference between the two groups of participants; that is, the medium items were being recalled in either a context of harder-to-recall items (shallow list) or easier-to-recall items (deep list). Therefore, although the medium words produced similar objective memory patterns (old/new judgments), the difference in comparative difficulty between the shallow and deep context conditions led to significantly different subjective experience ratings (R vs. K judgments). The main purpose of the current two experiments was to modify and extend the test-list context paradigm. The aforementioned test-list context experiments have always used the same type of stimuli across the medium and shallow/deep conditions (Bodner and Lindsay, 2003 and Tousignant and Bodner, 2012; see also Bodner & Richardson-Champion, 2007, for an event-details test-list context paradigm). Therefore, one aim of the current experiments was to demonstrate that the comparative difficulty of one type of stimuli can influence performance on a different type of stimuli. As in previous test-list context experiments, the comparative difficulty variable was created by requiring participants to study either a shallow or deep word list, but the medium study list for all participants was a set of faces. Additionally, instead of using an R-K judgment (or recollection/familiarity ratings; Tousignant & Bodner, 2012) to assess the impact of comparative difficulty, performance was gauged within a strategic regulation paradigm. Participants were required to make an old/new recognition judgment for every test item, but they were allowed to choose whether to report each response for scoring (points/penalties for correct and incorrect responses, respectively) or to withhold if they were unsure about their response (no points/penalties). If the test-list context effect is not dependent on using one class of stimuli, or a performance measure that requires people to necessarily evaluate conscious recollective details, then the comparative difficulty of the word lists should influence the strategic regulation of accuracy for the face stimuli.