Do metacognitive judgments alter memory performance beyond the benefits of retrieval practice? A comment on and replication attempt of Dougherty, Scheck, Nelson, and Narens (2005).

A central question in the metacognitive literature concerns whether the act of making a metacognitive judgment alters one's memory for the information about which the judgment was made. Dougherty, Scheck, Nelson, and Narens (2005, Memory & Cognition, 33(6), 1096-1115) attempted to address this question by having participants make either retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs; i.e., evaluations of past retrieval success), judgments of learning (JOLs; i.e., predictions of future retrieval success), or no explicit judgments. When comparing final retrieval accuracy they found that accuracy was greater for items where participants had made JOLs compared with items that received RCJs or no judgment, suggesting that simply making a JOL can improve later memory performance. The present article presents results from four separate replication attempts that fail to duplicate this finding. Combined results provide compelling evidence that making a metacognitive judgment, regardless of the type, has no impact on later memory performance above and beyond retrieval practice.

Making Retrospective Confidence Judgments Improves Learners' Ability to Decide What Not to Study.

Predictions about future retrieval success, known as judgments of learning (JOLs), are often viewed as important for effective control over learning. However, much less is known about how retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs), evaluations of past retrieval success, may affect control over learning. We compared participants' ability to identify items that would benefit from additional study after making either a JOL or an RCJ. Participants completed a cued-recall task in which they made a metacognitive judgment after an initial recall attempt and before making a restudy decision. Participants who made RCJs prior to their restudy decisions were more accurate at identifying items in need of being restudied, relative to participants who made JOLs. The results indicate that having participants assess their confidence in past retrieval success can nudge them toward better utilizing of valid information when deciding which items are in need of further study.