Strong memories are hard to scale

Abstract

People are generally skilled at using a confidence scale to rate the strength of their memories over a wide range. Specifically, low-confidence recognition decisions are often associated with close-to-chance accuracy, whereas high-confidence recognition decisions can be associated with close-to-perfect accuracy. However, using a 20-point rating scale, the authors found that the ability to scale memory strength had its limitations in that a high proportion of list items received the highest rating of 20. Efforts to induce participants to differentiate between these strong memories using emphatic instructions and alternative scales were not successful. Remember/know judgments indicated that these strong and hard-to-scale memories were often based on familiarity (not just recollection). Providing error feedback on a plurals discrimination task finally produced a high-confidence criterion shift. The authors suggest that the ability to scale strong (and almost perfectly accurate) memories may be limited because of the absence of differential error feedback for very strong memories in the past (the kind of differential error feedback that may account for the memory-scaling expertise that participants otherwise exhibit). Keywords: recognition memory, confidence and accuracy, signal-detection theory, feedback Memories vary in strength, and people are generally quite adept at using a numerical confidence scale to indicate how strong different memories are. This ability is most apparent in studies of recognition memory, in which accuracy is typically strongly related to confidence The predicted proportion correct for a confidence rating in the range of 11 to 20 is given by the area under the target distribution associated with that rating divided by the sum of the areas under the target and lure distributions associated with that rating. The predicted proportion correct for a confidence rating in the range of 1 to 10 is similar except that the numerator is the area under the lure distribution associated with a particular rating

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