Metacognitive awareness and adaptive recognition biases

Prior literature has primarily focused on the negative influences of misleading external sources on memory judgments. This study investigated whether participants can capitalize on generally reliable recommendations in order to improve their net performance; the focus was on potential roles for metacognitive monitoring (i.e., knowledge about one's own memory reliability) and performance feedback. In Experiment 1, participants received explicit external recommendations (Likely Old or Likely New) that were 75% valid during recognition tests containing deeply and shallowly encoded materials. In Experiment 2, participants received recommendations of differing validity (65% and 85%). Discrimination improved across both experiments when external recommendations were present versus absent. This improvement was influenced by metacognitive monitoring ability measured in the absence of recommendations. Thus, effective incorporation of external recommendations depended in part on how sensitive observers were to gradations of their internal evidence when recommendations were absent. Finally, corrective feedback did not improve participants' ability to use external recommendations, suggesting that metacognitive monitoring ability during recognition is not easily improved via feedback.