Framing affects scale usage for judgments of learning, not confidence in memory.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Metacognition
• Memory Research

Background:

• Metacognitive judgments of learning (JOLs) typically assess memory confidence.
• Framing JOLs in terms of forgetting versus remembering yields counterintuitive results, with forget-framed JOLs sometimes appearing higher.
• Two hypotheses, optimistic-anchoring and differential-scaling, attempt to explain this phenomenon.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test competing explanations for why forget-framed JOLs can appear higher than remember-framed JOLs.
• To determine if framing influences memory optimism or JOL scale distribution.
• To investigate the impact of framing on metacognitive judgments of learning.

Main Methods:

• Participants studied memory materials and made JOLs predicting recall.
• JOLs were framed either as likelihood of remembering or likelihood of forgetting.
• Three experiments manipulated task difficulty and response format (e.g., binary choice).

Main Results:

• Forget-framed JOLs were unaffected by task difficulty information.
• Forget-framed JOLs were lower than remember-framed JOLs in a high-JOL task and showed equivalent confidence in binary response tasks.
• Forget-framed JOLs were symmetrically distributed, leading to a higher mean due to scale centering, supporting differential scaling.

Conclusions:

• The results contradict the optimistic-anchoring hypothesis.
• Evidence supports the differential-scaling hypothesis: framing alters JOL distribution, not memory confidence.
• Framing influences the scaling of metacognitive judgments, not the underlying metacognitive accuracy.