Metamemory for Performed and Observed Actions: Within-Subjects (2016)

Undergraduates: Daniel Horschler, Jonathan Susser

Faculty Advisor: Neil Mulligan
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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The term "metamemory" is used to describe one's knowledge and understanding of one's own memory. This study centers on metamemory for actions, and asks how it is different from metamemory for words and phrases. Previous research has found that people's predictions of later recall of words is often fairly accurate. When it comes to actions however, the literature indicates that people have extremely poor accuracy when making these predictions. This project focuses on parsing out differences between prediction and actual recall of observed versus performed actions. Subjects are presented with different objects, asked to either perform actions with those objects or watch the experimenter perform actions, asked to give predictions of how likely they believe it is that they will remember the actions later, and finally are given a recall test. We hypothesize that subjects will recall the actions they perform themselves significantly better than actions that they watch the experimenter perform, with an eye towards determining how accurate their predictions of recall will be. The results of this study will help to clarify the level of insight that people have into their own memory of actions, which has important real-world implications in the realm of trade school education, where students learn through action-oriented tasks as opposed to text-based materials.