They can take a hint: Older adults effectively integrate memory cues during recognition

Here is a hint! How children integrate reliable recommendations in their memory decisions

Children's own memory is not the only reliable source of information about past events. Others may possess relevant knowledge, and children must learn to appropriately consider it in combination with their own memories. In the current study, we investigated 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) ability to incorporate probabilistically reliable (70% accurate) hints into their memory decisions. Results revealed that children across ages were appropriately sensitive to these cues without following them blindly and indiscriminately. Furthermore, individual differences in metamemory monitoring predicted overall accuracy improvements after receiving cues in 9-year-olds but not in 5- and 7-year-olds, revealing a developmental role of metamemory for discerning when cues are most informative or needed. Although 5-year-olds increased overall confidence in their memory after receiving invalid cues, they still preserved the capacity to monitor their memory in the face of inaccurate information. Overall, children were sensitive to reliable recommendations, but developing metacognitive mechanisms predicted judicious benefits from cues.

Ignoring memory hints: The stubborn influence of environmental cues on recognition memory

Recognition judgments can benefit from the use of environmental cues that signal the general likelihood of encountering familiar versus unfamiliar stimuli. While incorporating such cues is often adaptive, there are circumstances (e.g., eyewitness testimony) in which observers should fully ignore environmental cues in order to preserve memory report fidelity. The current studies used the explicit memory cueing paradigm to examine whether participants could intentionally ignore reliable environmental cues when instructed. Three experiments demonstrated that participants could volitionally dampen the directional influence of environmental cues on their recognition judgments (i.e., whether influenced to respond "old" or "new") but did not fully eliminate their influence. Although monetary incentives diminished the mean influence of cues on responses rates, finer grained individual differences analysis, as well as confidence and RTs analyses, demonstrated that participants were still systematically influenced. These results demonstrate that environmental cues presented at test remain a potent influence on recognition decisions and subjective confidence even when ostensibly ignored. (PsycINFO Database Record

Pupil dilation during recognition memory: Isolating unexpected recognition from judgment uncertainty

Optimally discriminating familiar from novel stimuli demands a decision-making process informed by prior expectations. Here we demonstrate that pupillary dilation (PD) responses during recognition memory decisions are modulated by expectations, and more specifically, that pupil dilation increases for unexpected compared to expected recognition. Furthermore, multi-level modeling demonstrated that the time course of the dilation during each individual trial contains separable early and late dilation components, with the early amplitude capturing unexpected recognition, and the later trailing slope reflecting general judgment uncertainty or effort. This is the first demonstration that the early dilation response during recognition is dependent upon observer expectations and that separate recognition expectation and judgment uncertainty components are present in the dilation time course of every trial. The findings provide novel insights into adaptive memory-linked orienting mechanisms as well as the general cognitive underpinnings of the pupillary index of autonomic nervous system activity.