Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

FOK (Feeling of Knowing) judgment is one of the most important monitoring judgments of meta memory. Studies on FOK judgments focus on two aspects: rankings of FOK judgments and accuracy of FOK judgments. Based on the studies. Koriat (1993) proposed the Accessibility Model: the rankings of FOK judgments increase with increasing the amount of accessible information; the accuracy of FOK judgments increases with increase of the strength of accessible information. But, in 1998, Scheriber’s studies indicated that the rankings of FOK judgments decreased with the increasing amount of implicit information that had preexisting connections to the targets. Why did the two studies produce contrary results? We think it was because Koriat’s research studied the explicit and retrieved information, and Scheriber’s research studied the implicit information that had preexisting connections to the targets. If we study the two kinds of information at the same time in the identical experiments, what results would appear? In addition, Scheriber’s research only studied the rankings of FOK judgments, however the two kinds of accessible information will be how to influence the accuracy of FOK judgments? The present research aimed at studying these problems.

In experiment 1, the design is Within-Subject Design, two target set sizes were given in order to compare the influence of two kinds of the amount of accessible information on rankings and accuracy of FOK judgments, one was the explicit and retrieved information, the other was the implicit information which had preexisting connections to the targets.

Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 were designed to investigate the influence of strength of activated information on the ranking and accuracy of FOK judgments by manipulating the presenting time and the learning times. In Experiment 2, the design was 2 × 2 Within-Subject Design, the two factors were the target’s presenting time (2s and 4s) and the target set sizes (big target set size and small target set size). In Experiment 3, the design was 2 × 2 Within-Subject Design too, but for enhancing the strength of activated information, the two factors were the target’s learning time (1 time and 2 times) and the target set sizes (big target set size and small target set size).

Results showed that not only explicit information but also implicit information influenced the rankings of FOK judgments. The more the amount of explicit information was retrieved, the higher the rankings of FOK judgments were, however, the more the amount of implicit information was, the lower the rankings of FOK judgments were. The accuracy of FOK judgments was influenced by the strength of activated information. The strength of activated targets had favorable influence on the accuracy of FOK judgments. While the strength of activated implicit information had negative effect on the accuracy of FOK judgments.

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