The role of awareness in self-derivation of new knowledge through memory integration

Knowledge is built through direct experiences and productive processes like self-derivation through memory integration. Prior research suggests that individual variability in self-derivation is associated with awareness of the task structure. In three experiments, half of the participants were told the task structure before participating in a self-derivation task (between-subjects manipulations). In a fourth experiment, half of participants were told the task structure before the second half of the task trials (within-subjects manipulation). Explicit instruction regarding the task structure did not facilitate self-derivation performance in any of the experiments. Additionally, neither providing the opportunity to explicitly practice the task through example trials (Experiment 2) nor implicitly practice the task by engaging in the task three (Experiment 3) or two (Experiment 4) times facilitated self-derivation performance. The interventions failed to facilitate self-derivation performance even when participants clearly encoded and remembered information about the task structure (Experiments 1B and 4). As in prior research, at the individual level, measures of verbal comprehension and working memory were positively correlated with task performance. We also measured task-based (debriefing questions) and trait-based (Metacognitive Awareness Inventory) awareness and found that only task-based awareness was positively associated with self-derivation performance. These results provide novel insights into the role (or lack thereof) of information about the task structure and suggest that self-discovery of the opportunity to self-derive new information may be the key.