Using ecphoric confidence ratings to discriminate seen from unseen faces: The effects of retention interval and distinctiveness

Reliable retrieval is intrinsically rewarding: Recency, item difficulty, study session memory, and subjective confidence predict satisfaction in word-pair recall

The recall of a distant memory may appear satisfying and suggest successful retrieval is inherently rewarding. If the brain incentivizes retrieval attempts on the prospect of an internal retrieval reward, then the desire for that reward might natively reinforce declarative memory access. But what determines the level of retrieval satisfaction? We tested the idea that retrieval attempt uncertainty drives retrieval satisfaction. For instance, the more distant the memory, the more satisfying should it be to successfully retrieve it. Alternatively, the brain issues rewards based on the level of confidence in recall independent of the recall achievement. If so, then more confident retrieval is also more satisfying. In an online experiment containing five Swahili-English word pair study sessions spaced across one week, we tested 30 English-speaking participants' recall satisfaction and memory confidence during learning as well as in a final cued recall test. We hypothesized that retrieval satisfaction should either increase or decrease with retrieval uncertainty as indicated by time since encoding, and how little in overall they recalled from the session. We found that retrieval satisfaction decreased with time since encoding and with study session retrieval performance. Moreover, we found that retrieval confidence and satisfaction ratings were highly related in the experiment. We also found a reliable interaction between confidence and word difficulty indicating that confidently recalled difficult items induced more satisfaction. Thus, the brain appears to reward both retrieval confidence and to a lesser extent, fruitful retrieval effort. Our findings may explain seemingly irrational self-regulated study behavior such as avoiding learning-efficient but difficult training protocols, as effects of a system rationally seeking to accrue intrinsic cognitive reward.

The Relationship Between Eyewitness Confidence and Identification Accuracy: A New Synthesis

Summary

The U.S. legal system increasingly accepts the idea that the confidence expressed by an eyewitness who identified a suspect from a lineup provides little information as to the accuracy of that identification. There was a time when this pessimistic assessment was entirely reasonable because of the questionable eyewitness-identification procedures that police commonly employed. However, after more than 30 years of eyewitness-identification research, our understanding of how to properly conduct a lineup has evolved considerably, and the time seems ripe to ask how eyewitness confidence informs accuracy under more pristine testing conditions (e.g., initial, uncontaminated memory tests using fair lineups, with no lineup administrator influence, and with an immediate confidence statement). Under those conditions, mock-crime studies and police department field studies have consistently shown that, for adults, (a) confidence and accuracy are strongly related and (b) high-confidence suspect identifications are remarkably accurate. However, when certain non-pristine testing conditions prevail (e.g., when unfair lineups are used), the accuracy of even a high-confidence suspect ID is seriously compromised. Unfortunately, some jurisdictions have not yet made reforms that would create pristine testing conditions and, hence, our conclusions about the reliability of high-confidence identifications cannot yet be applied to those jurisdictions. However, understanding the information value of eyewitness confidence under pristine testing conditions can help the criminal justice system to simultaneously achieve both of its main objectives: to exonerate the innocent (by better appreciating that initial, low-confidence suspect identifications are error prone) and to convict the guilty (by better appreciating that initial, high-confidence suspect identifications are surprisingly accurate under proper testing conditions).