The sound of accurate recognition memory decisions

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Speech Science

Background:

• Metacognitive confidence in memory judgments typically uses self-report scales.
• These scales predict accuracy but may include unrelated individual differences.
• Prosody (speech acoustics) in perceptual tasks offers automatic cues to judgment accuracy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if speech prosody predicts accuracy in long-term episodic memory judgments.
• To determine if acoustic features of spoken memory reports carry information about their correctness.

Main Methods:

• Participants studied faces and underwent forced-choice recognition tests.
• Spoken responses ('Number One/Two/Three/Four') were recorded.
• Pitch, loudness, speech rate, and onset time of responses were extracted as predictors.

Main Results:

• Higher pitch, greater loudness, faster speech rate, and earlier onset time distinguished accurate memory judgments from inaccurate ones.
• This pattern held for both easier (2AFC) and harder (4AFC) recognition trials.
• Speech rate and onset time predicted accuracy independently of explicit confidence ratings.

Conclusions:

• Prosodic features of spoken memory reports contain reliable information about judgment accuracy.
• Acoustic cues in speech may facilitate accurate metamnemonic inferences about memory performance.