Special Coverage

Age Differences in the Tendency to Self-Monitor Memory Performance (SYM13)

Dayna Touron (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)

Summary by Taylor Curley, Digital Content Associate Editor

This recap is part of a special series of session summaries from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.

The topic of metamemory – the monitoring and control of one’s own memory – is typically associated with students studying for tests. However, the ability to accurately assess one’s memory (monitoring) and engage in effective memory strategies (control) are important throughout the lifespan. This is especially true for older adults, who often must remember complex information necessary for their health, such as their daily medication.

Metamemory can be easily measured by examining the correspondence between judgments about memory and actual memory performance. Still, these judgments often do not capture the quality or frequency of introspections, nor do they indicate which of the two processes underlie metacognition, monitoring and control, dominate learners’ thoughts during these tasks. Dayna Touron examined these components of metamemory in both young and older adults.

In a first study, Touron probed young and older adults about the contents of their thoughts during memory tasks, specifically if related to control and monitoring. As shown in the figure below, the frequency of such thoughts, referred to as task-related intrusions (TRIs), were highest for older adults who provided open-ended responses and were predominantly about monitoring their own performance. By comparison, young adults reported similar numbers of thoughts about control as older adults, but significantly fewer thoughts about monitoring.

In a second study, young and older adults engaged in a cued-recall memory task and assigned to one of two conditions. In one condition, learners were only probed about their thoughts during the task (as in Study 1). In the other condition, learners were both probed about their thoughts and asked to predict how likely they were to remember the items they were studying (i.e., judgments of learning; JOLs). As shown in the figure below, they found that providing JOLs increased the occurrence of thoughts related to metacognitive monitoring in older, but not young, adults.

The conclusions of these studies are mixed. On the one hand, older adults display behavior that is beneficial to memory by engaging in more spontaneous thoughts about monitoring than young adults. On the other hand, the increase in spontaneous thoughts of monitoring did not lead to increases in recall or metamemory judgment accuracy. In short, more monitoring does not necessarily lead to better memory performance, even for older adults.