Metamemory judgments and study time allocation in young and older adults: dissociative effects of a generation task

This study explored age-related differences in the use of metacognitive judgment to allocate extra study time according to the perceived difficulty of a learning task. The task difficulty was varied by manipulating the encoding condition which entailed either generating or reading paired associates. Perceived difficulty was measured by the global prediction rating, whereby participants predicted that they would recall fewer words in the learning task they considered hardest. Participants were first asked to predict their own future recall performance and then learned paired associates in their own time, and finally performed a cued-recall test for each encoding condition. Our results replicated earlier findings that generation improves the memory performance of both young and older adults. However, both groups thought that generation would be more difficult than reading and predicted that they would recall fewer words under that condition. The young adults allocated different amounts of study time to the two tasks, whereas the older adults allocated the same time. This was interpreted as an age-related impairment in self-initiated coordination of metacognitive judgment and the control processes required for effective allocation of study time.