Answering a factual question today increases one's confidence in the same answer tomorrow - independent of fluency.

We investigated the cognitive processes that cause confidence to increase. Participants were asked 48 general-knowledge questions either once or three times, without feedback. After 2 min (Experiment 1) or 48 h (Experiment 2) they were asked the same questions again, and rated their confidence.

How the wisdom of crowds, and of the crowd within, are affected by expertise.

We investigated the effect of expertise on the wisdom of crowds. Participants completed 60 trials of a numerical estimation task, during which they saw 50-100 asterisks and were asked to estimate how many stars they had just seen. Experiment 1 established that both inner- and outer-crowd wisdom extended to our novel task: Single responses alone were less accurate than responses aggregated across a single participant (showing inner-crowd wisdom) and responses aggregated across different participants were even more accurate (showing outer-crowd wisdom).

How to activate students' natural desire to test themselves.

Testing oneself (i.e., doing retrieval practice) is an effective way to study.

Audiovisual quality impacts assessments of job candidates in video interviews: Evidence for an AV quality bias.

Video job interviews have become a common hiring practice, allowing employers to save money and recruit from a wider applicant pool. But differences in job candidates' internet connections mean that some interviews will have higher audiovisual (AV) quality than others. We hypothesized that interviewers would be impacted by AV quality when they rated job candidates.

A metacognitive illusion in monkeys.

Like humans, monkeys can make accurate judgements about their own memory by reporting their confidence during cognitive tasks. Some have suggested that animals use associative learning to make accurate confidence judgements, while others have suggested animals directly access and estimate the strength of their memories. Here we test a third, non-exclusive possibility: perhaps monkeys, like humans, base metacognitive inferences on heuristic cues.

Performance bias: Why judgments of learning are not affected by learning.

Past research has shown a performance bias: People expect their future performance level on a task to match their current performance level, even when there are good reasons to expect future performance to differ from current performance. One explanation of this bias is that judgments are controlled by what learners can observe, and while current performance is usually observable, changes in performance (i.e.

The influence of feedback on predictions of future memory performance.

Kornell and Rhodes (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 19, 1-13, 2013) reported that correct answer feedback impairs the accuracy of prospective memory judgments. The current experiments explored the boundaries of this effect. In Experiment 1, participants studied Lithuanian-English word pairs, took an initial test, and were either given correct answer feedback or no feedback at all.

Do the Best Teachers Get the Best Ratings?

We review recent studies that asked: do college students learn relatively more from teachers whom they rate highly on student evaluation forms? Recent studies measured learning at two-time points. When learning was measured with a test at the end of the course, the teachers who got the highest ratings were the ones who contributed the most to learning. But when learning was measured as performance in subsequent related courses, the teachers who had received relatively low ratings appeared to have been most effective.

Retrieval attempts enhance learning regardless of time spent trying to retrieve.

Attempting to retrieve information from memory is an engaging cognitive activity. We predicted that people would learn more when they had spent more time attempting to retrieve. In experiments 1a and 1b, participants were shown trivia questions for 0, 5, 10, or 30 seconds and then the answer was revealed.

Retrieval attempts enhance learning, but retrieval success (versus failure) does not matter.

Retrieving information from memory enhances learning. We propose a 2-stage framework to explain the benefits of retrieval. Stage 1 takes place as one attempts to retrieve an answer, which activates knowledge related to the retrieval cue.

Young children bet on their numerical skills: metacognition in the numerical domain.

Metacognition, the ability to assess one's own knowledge, has been targeted as a critical learning mechanism in mathematics education. Yet the early childhood origins of metacognition have proven difficult to study. Using a novel nonverbal task and a comprehensive set of metacognitive measures, we provided the strongest evidence to date that young children are metacognitive.

Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages.

The present research assessed the potential effects of expecting to teach on learning. In two experiments, participants studied passages either in preparation for a later test or in preparation for teaching the passage to another student who would then be tested. In reality, all participants were tested, and no one actually engaged in teaching.

Where is the "meta" in animal metacognition?

Apes, dolphins, and some monkeys seem to have metacognitive abilities: They can accurately evaluate the likelihood that their response in cognitive task was (or will be) correct. These certainty judgments are seen as significant because they imply that animals can evaluate internal cognitive states, which may entail meaningful self-reflection. But little research has investigated what is being reflected upon: Researchers have assumed that when animals make metacognitive judgments they evaluate internal memory strength.

Attempting to answer a meaningful question enhances subsequent learning even when feedback is delayed.

Attempting to retrieve information from memory enhances subsequent learning even if the retrieval attempt is unsuccessful. Recent evidence suggests that this benefit materializes only if subsequent study occurs immediately after the retrieval attempt. Previous studies have prompted retrieval using a cue (e.

Retrospective and prospective metacognitive judgments in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).

A growing body of research suggests that some non-human animals are capable of making accurate metacognitive judgments. In previous studies, non-human animals have made either retrospective or prospective judgments (about how they did on a test or how they will do on a test, respectively). These two types of judgments are dissociable in humans.

Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning.

The present study explored the effects of lecture fluency on students' metacognitive awareness and regulation. Participants watched one of two short videos of an instructor explaining a scientific concept. In the fluent video, the instructor stood upright, maintained eye contact, and spoke fluidly without notes.

Feedback reduces the metacognitive benefit of tests.

Testing long-term memory has dual benefits: It enhances learning and it helps learners discriminate what they know from what they do not know. The latter benefit, known as delayed judgment of learning (dJOL) effect, has been well documented, but in prior research participants have not been provided with test feedback. Yet when people study they almost universally (a) get feedback and (b) judge their learning subsequent to receiving the feedback.

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: the roles of discrimination and retrieval.

Kornell and Bjork (Psychological science 19:585-592, 2008) found that interleaving exemplars of different categories enhanced inductive learning of the concepts based on those exemplars. They hypothesized that the benefit of mixing exemplars from different categories is that doing so highlights differences between the categories. Kang and Pashler (Applied cognitive psychology 26:97-103, 2012) obtained results consistent with this discriminative-contrast hypothesis: Interleaving enhanced inductive learning, but temporal spacing, which does not highlight category differences, did not.

Self-regulated learning: beliefs, techniques, and illusions.

Knowing how to manage one's own learning has become increasingly important in recent years, as both the need and the opportunities for individuals to learn on their own outside of formal classroom settings have grown. During that same period, however, research on learning, memory, and metacognitive processes has provided evidence that people often have a faulty mental model of how they learn and remember, making them prone to both misassessing and mismanaging their own learning. After a discussion of what learners need to understand in order to become effective stewards of their own learning, we first review research on what people believe about how they learn and then review research on how people's ongoing assessments of their own learning are influenced by current performance and the subjective sense of fluency.

When and why a failed test potentiates the effectiveness of subsequent study.

Teachers and trainers often try to prevent learners from making errors, but recent findings (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) have demonstrated that tests can potentiate subsequent learning even when the correct answer is difficult or impossible to generate (e.

The ease-of-processing heuristic and the stability bias: dissociating memory, memory beliefs, and memory judgments.

Judgments about memory are essential in promoting knowledge; they help identify trustworthy memories and predict what information will be retained in the future. In the three experiments reported here, we investigated the mechanisms underlying predictions about memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, single words were presented once or multiple times, in large or small type.

Benefits of Accumulating Versus Diminishing Cues in Recall.

Optimizing learning over multiple retrieval opportunities requires a joint consideration of both the probability and the mnemonic value of a successful retrieval. Previous research has addressed this trade-off by manipulating the schedule of practice trials, suggesting that a pattern of increasingly long lags-"expanding retrieval practice"-may keep retrievals successful while gradually increasing their mnemonic value (Landauer & Bjork, 1978). Here we explore the trade-off issue further using an analogous manipulation of cue informativeness.

The costs and benefits of providing feedback during learning.

It seems uncontroversial that providing feedback after a test, in the form of the correct answer, enhances learning. In real-world educational situations, however, the time available for learning is often constrained-and feedback takes time. We report an experiment in which total time for learning was fixed, thereby creating a trade-off between spending time receiving feedback and spending time on other learning activities.

Spacing as the friend of both memory and induction in young and older adults.

We compared the effects of spaced versus massed practice on young and older adults' ability to learn visually complex paintings. We expected a spacing advantage when 1 painting per artist was studied repeatedly and tested (repetition) but perhaps a massing advantage, especially for older adults, when multiple different paintings by each artist were studied and tested (induction). We were surprised to find that spacing facilitated both inductive and repetition learning by both young and older adults, even though the participants rated massing superior to spacing for inductive learning.

The virtues of ignorance.

Although ignorance and uncertainty are usually unwelcome feelings, they have unintuitive advantages for both human and non-human animals, which we review here. We begin with the perils of too much information: expertise and knowledge can come with illusions (and delusions) of knowing. We then describe how withholding information can counteract these perils: providing people with less information enables them to judge more precisely what they know and do not know, which in turn enhances long-term memory.