Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Based on previous studies, in this experiment, two hypotheses about the mechanism of Feeling-of-knowing (FOK) — the cue familiarity hypothesis and the target memorability hypothesis (or retrievability hypothesis) were re-verified. The design of this experiment was 2 × 3 within-group design. The two factors were levels of materials (meaningful and meaningless associated Chinese word-pairs), and three types of connections of the word-pairs: (1) A-B A-B; (2) A-D A-B; (3) C-D A-B. The participants were undergraduates of Peking University, 10 men and 10 women, their age ranged from 18-22. The program of experiment was made in Visual Basic, and the experiment was conducted on 586 computer. The materials were a list of 132 pairs of two-syllable Chinese word-pairs. 60 pairs were in the first half and 60 pairs in the second, 6 pairs were used for exercise, 6 pairs as buffers. The materials were presented to subjects in a random order that maintained the first-half–second-half distinction. The procedure included four phases: (1) Word-pairs learning: subjects were instructed to learn a list of pairs of items, and were told that after learning when later presented with the left item, they could recall the right ones. (2) Cued recall: subjects were given the cue times and asked to write down the target words. (3) FOK judgment: all the cues were presented randomly, subjects were asked to make a FOK judgment on a scale from 1 to 10. (4) Forced-choice recognition tests: six alternatives were used, the target was one of the alternatives and was placed in a random position with respect to the other options. The subjects’ choices and reaction time were recorded by computer. The ranking of the magnitude of FOK judgments was higher when cues were repeated than when not repeated. The subjects’ recall performance of the meaningful word-pairs was higher than the meaningless ones. This indicated that the memorial strength of the targets were significantly different between two types of materials. This difference determined the magnitude of FOK judgments. The magnitude of FOK judgment for the meaningful word-pairs was significantly higher than the meaningless ones. This experiment favors the point that the magnitude of FOK judgment was determined by both cue familiarity and target memorability, which are not absolutely against each other. But to significantly influence the rank of FOK judgment, the intensity of the two factors must at least reach a certain degree.

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