TY - JOUR
T1 - Looking inward and back
T2 - Real-time monitoring of visual working memories
AU - Suchow, Jordan W.
AU - Fougnie, Daryl
AU - Alvarez, George A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 American Psychological Association.
PY - 2017/4/1
Y1 - 2017/4/1
N2 - Confidence in our memories is influenced by many factors, including beliefs about the perceptibility or memorability of certain kinds of objects and events, as well as knowledge about our skill sets, habits, and experiences. Notoriously, our knowledge and beliefs about memory can lead us astray, causing us to be overly confident in eyewitness testimony or to overestimate the frequency of recent experiences. Here, using visual working memory as a case study, we stripped away all these potentially misleading cues, requiring observers to make confidence judgments by directly assessing the quality of their memory representations. We show that individuals can monitor the status of information in working memory as it degrades over time. Our findings suggest that people have access to information reflecting the existence and quality of their working memories, and furthermore, that they can use this information to guide their behavior.
AB - Confidence in our memories is influenced by many factors, including beliefs about the perceptibility or memorability of certain kinds of objects and events, as well as knowledge about our skill sets, habits, and experiences. Notoriously, our knowledge and beliefs about memory can lead us astray, causing us to be overly confident in eyewitness testimony or to overestimate the frequency of recent experiences. Here, using visual working memory as a case study, we stripped away all these potentially misleading cues, requiring observers to make confidence judgments by directly assessing the quality of their memory representations. We show that individuals can monitor the status of information in working memory as it degrades over time. Our findings suggest that people have access to information reflecting the existence and quality of their working memories, and furthermore, that they can use this information to guide their behavior.
KW - Metamemory
KW - Monitoring
KW - Visual memory
KW - Working memory
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85007223329&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85007223329&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/xlm0000320
DO - 10.1037/xlm0000320
M3 - Article
C2 - 27685022
AN - SCOPUS:85007223329
SN - 0278-7393
VL - 43
SP - 660
EP - 668
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
IS - 4
ER -