The role of familiarity and recollection for metamemory judgments
Creators: name: Moulin, Chris
name: Meunier, Lucile
name: Angel, Lucie
name: Bastin, Christine
name: Souchay, Céline
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: familiarity
subject: metamemory judgments
subject: memory
subject: aging
subject: metamemory
subject: recollection

description: From a phenomenological point of view, episodic remembering is an autonoetic experience based on metacognitive feelings (Perrin et al., 2020). One of these most popular epistemic feelings is called the feeling of knowing (FOK). The FOK is a phenomenon during which we know that our memory contains a piece of specific information (e.g., a name). Sometimes, we can only access partial information (e.g., the first letter of the name), but we are currently not able to retrieve the sought-for information (Schacter, 1983; Yonelinas, 2002). The FOK is considered as a metamemory phenomenon (Martinez, 2006; Nelson &amp; Narens, 1990). Metamemory is a cognitive process allowing to monitor and control memory mechanisms (Martinez, 2006). It is a critical component for memory retrieval (Mandler, 1980; Souchay et al., 2007). According to Nelson and Narens (1990), metacognition is composed of two distinct processes: metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control. The former receives the content of all processes in progress; whereas the latter modulates itself depending on information received and on the memory content. To explore the FOK, a three-phases paradigm tries to produce this epistemic feeling to participants (e.g., Leibert &amp; Nelson, 1998; Mazancieux et al., 2020; Souchay et al., 2007). In an encoding phase, participants see one cue and one target for each trial. In a recalling phase, participants see the cues again one by one and have to recall the target associated with in the first phase. After each trial, they provide a FOK-judgment. Participants have to judge if they could recognize the target which was earlier presented with the cue between several propositions. Then, they proceed to the recognition phase. Participants see one last time the cues and have to identify the target associated with it among one or several distractors. Results from this paradigm highlighted that memory performance and metamemory judgements seem to be linked (e.g., Koriat, 1993; Souchay et al., 2007). For instance, previous studies distinguished the episodic process (on which we will focus) related to personal memory and the semantic process related to general knowledge. Results showed that episodic-FOK accuracy decreases in older adults as well as episodic-memory performance (Sacher et al., 2013; Souchay et al., 2000, 2007), whereas both semantic-FOK accuracy and semantic-memory performance are stable in aging (Souchay et al., 2007). Nevertheless, this metamemory decline of the episodic component in aging does not appear using retrospective confidence judgements (RCJs; Cauvin et al., 2019; McWilliams et al., 2023). Whereas the FOK judgments are prospective judgments made before the recognition phase, the RCJs are based on a response that participants already gave. This difference between prospective and retrospective judgements was also found with younger adults (Mazancieux et al., 2020). Metamemory efficiency in an episodic task was lower that metamemory efficiency in a semantic task using FOK judgments, but there was no difference of metamemory efficiency between the episodic and the semantic task using RCJs. Thus, prospective and retrospective judgments seem to rely on different cognitive processes. The partial-retrieval hypothesis argues that the FOK is determined by the accessibility of pertinent information (Koriat, 1993). According to the latter hypothesis, the accessibility of the target motivates search and retrieval processes to access partial information of the target, triggering the FOK (Koriat, 1993; Koriat &amp; Levy-Sadot, 2001). Partial information is mainly based on the target features including episodic or semantic elements, fragments of the target, learning context, or knowledge for instance. This search of information involves the recollection process. Consequently, the FOK depends on the number of information retrieved by the accessibility process (Chua et al., 2009; Koriat, 1993; Mazancieux et al., 2020). On the contrary, it is argued that retrospective judgements tend to be more accurate than prospective judgments because more information is available for retrospective judgements (Fleming et al., 2016). When participants have to perform both retrospective and prospective judgments during the same task, their retrospective judgements are based on the fluency of the response, the accuracy of the response, and on their confidence; whereas their prospective judgements are only based on the previous retrospective judgment. Based on these previous studies, we propose that the metamemory deficit observed in healthy aging with FOK judgments results from recollection difficulties, whereas RCJs are only based on familiarity. To test this hypothesis, we developed a paradigm that assesses metamemory efficiency in both familiarity and recollection tasks using RCJs. This study aims to establish a first axis on which other studies could be developed with a more appropriate design. Thus, the current study should be considered as an exploratory study.