Metamemory judgments and study time allocation in young and older adults: dissociative effects of a generation task.

This study explored age-related differences in the use of metacognitive judgment to allocate extra study time according to the perceived difficulty of a learning task. The task difficulty was varied by manipulating the encoding condition which entailed either generating or reading paired associates. Perceived difficulty was measured by the global prediction rating, whereby participants predicted that they would recall fewer words in the learning task they considered hardest.