Underlying mechanisms of initial feelings of knowing in children

Past research has pointed to two contrasting mechanisms behind feeling-of-knowing judgments (FOKs). The trace-based account proposes a direct internal monitor that detects the presence or non-presence of a target item. The inferential account dictates that judgments are actually based on cues external to the memory trace, such as familiarity; FOKs could therefore be based on sometimes misleading information. Thus, while a direct mechanism will lead to good learning strategies (i.e. successful searches), an inferential process could potentially lead to less optimal strategies (i.e. search for unknown target information). The question posed in this research was: What processes underlie the judgments children make prior to fully retrieving a target item? We used a simplified version of Reder and Ritter's (1992) game show paradigm to investigate the accuracy (and mechanism) of children's initial FOKs. The experiment found that initial FOKs were largely driven by familiarity of the cues. These data have important implications for strategies children utilize in educational settings.