Item-specific and relational encoding are effective at reducing the illusion of competence.

Metamemory, or the ability to understand the capacities of one's own memory, is important for learning. To investigate questions surrounding metamemory, researchers commonly have participants make judgments of learning (JOLs) at encoding, in which participants rate their likelihood of recalling the target in a cue-target word pair when shown only the cue at test. However, the associative direction of cue-target pairs can affect the calibration of JOLs.