Meta-metakognition : The regulation of confidence realism in episodic and semantic memory

The aim of this thesis was to investigate whether people have the ability to make their confidence judgments for episodic and semantic memory tasks more realistic. How realistic a person’s confidence judgments are reflects how well their confidence judgments for their memory reports correspond to the actual correctness of the reports. The regulation of first-order confidence judgments by making successful second-order judgments can be seen as a form of meta-metacognition, since it aims at regulating a metacognitive process. Study I consisted of two experiments, and investigated whether people could increase the realism in their reports by excluding the confidence judgments they believed were unrealistic. The participants were shown a video clip and, in the Confidence task, were told to answer questions about the video and rate how confident they were that they had answered the questions correctly. Half of the participants answered two-alternative questions (recognition), and half had to come up with their own answers (recall). The participants then performed the Exclusion task, in which they were asked to exclude the 15 answers they believed had the most unrealistic confidence judgments. In Experiment 1 the recognition condition decreased their level of realism in their report, and in Experiment 2 the recall condition increased their level of realism. In Study II, the aim was to investigate whether people could increase the realism in their report by modifying the confidence judgments they believed were unrealistic. The relationship between realism of confidence and two possible memory cues, the phenomenological memory qualities Remember/Know and processing fluency, was investigated as well. The procedure was similar to that in Study I, with the exception that all participants answered recall questions and that the participants in the so-called Adjustment task were told to modify the confidence judgments they believed were unrealistic. Results showed that the participants were able to increase the realism of their confidence judgments, even though the effect was small. In Study III, the aim was to investigate whether people had the possibility to increase their confidence realism in semantic memory reports and whether individual differences, personality and cognitive styles, could help explain differences in this ability. The procedure was very similar to that in Study II, and the results showed that the participants only managed to increase the realism for correct items in the Adjustment task. In Study IV, the aim was to investigate whether the improvements in realism found in Study II could be further enhanced by giving people advice during the Adjustment task and asking them to “try more” in an Extra Adjustment task. However, results showed that although the participants managed to improve their realism like in Study II, they were not able to further improve it when given advice or by “trying more”. In all, Studies II, III and IV (and to some extent also Study I) lend support to the idea that people are able to regulate the realism of their confidence judgments by making successful second-order judgments

Reinforcing the Attitude-Behavior Relationship in Persuasive Game Design: Four Design Recommendations for Persuasive Games for Societal Interventions

Persuasive games for societal interventions aim to shape, reinforceor change players’ attitudes and behavior to help solving complex societalissues. In earlier work, we explored how persuasive game mechanics maycontribute to the formation of attitudes in persuasive games. As a follow-up, this paper presents four design recommendations that could increase the chance that these attitudes will actually lead to the desired behavior shown by players after the game: viz., these attitudes require the right conditions to become a predictor of the desired, post-game behavior.In order to arrive at these recommendations we looked at relevant work from the field of social psychology. Next we linked our insights to the context of persuasive game design. This yielded four conceptual design recommendations for maximizing the likelihood for an attitude influenced by a persuasive game to result in the desired behavior in the real world;1. aligning the degree of specification of a game’s message and the desired behavior2. emphasizing the function of the attitude to be influenced3. enabling players to reflect on their internal states4. emphasizing personal relevance of an attitude to a behavioral choiceSo far, these recommendations are still theoretical in nature. We therefore discuss how future work should empirically examine these, including their implications for the effective use of persuasive game mechanics.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Policy Analysi