The purpose of the study is to examine young children's (4- to 7-year-old) selective trust decisions in two different data sets; one was for selecting from whom to ask information and the other was for interpersonal trust decision where children encountered with two research assistants; one provided precise and the other provided relative…

A prominent and long-standing theory of eyewitness identification decision making distinguishes between "absolute judgments," based on the lineup members' match to the witness's memory of the perpetrator, versus "relative judgments," based on match values relative to other lineup members. This distinction was implemented in a…

Recent studies have revealed that memory performance is better when participants have the opportunity to make a choice regarding the experimental task (choice condition) than when they do not have such a choice (fixed condition). These studies, however, used intentional memory tasks, leaving open the question whether the choice effect also applies…

Counterfactual thinking is a form of mental simulation that informs causal judgments regarding the role antecedent events played in producing present outcomes. We examined whether inducing participants to think counterfactually about a case involving eyewitness evidence would sensitize them to variations in eyewitness evidence quality.…

This study investigated teachers' monitoring and regulation of students' learning from texts. According to the cue-utilization framework (Koriat, in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 126, 349-370, 1997), monitoring accuracy depends on how predictive the information (or cues) that teachers use to make monitoring judgments actually is for…

When a fingerprint is located at a crime scene, a human examiner is counted upon to manually compare this print to those stored in a database. Several experiments have now shown that these professional analysts are highly accurate, but not infallible, much like other fields that involve high-stakes decision-making. One method to offset mistakes in…

How do we assess what we remember? Previous work on metacognition suggests that confidence judgments are more accurate when given after than before a response to a perceptual task. Here we present two experiments that investigate the influence of decision and response on metacognitive accuracy in a memory task so as to establish what kind of…

Previous research is mixed regarding whether laypeople are sensitive to sample size. Here the author argues that this is in part because sample size sensitivity follows a curvilinear function with decreasing sensitivity as sample size become larger. This functional form reconciles apparent discrepancies in the literature, accounting for results…

Parents who vary in their experience with formal schooling are likely to use different types of informal guidance with their children. However, rather than assuming a deficit approach we need evidence regarding how parents with limited schooling support their children's learning. Forty U.S. families of Mexican-heritage, from two levels of…

This article advocates using Leventhal's (1980) justice judgment theory to incorporate distributive and procedural justice into summative assessment of student learning in higher education. It reviews important commonalities between the process of employee performance appraisal in organizations and practices to assess student learning in academe…

A widely held assumption in metamemory is that better, more accurate metamemory monitoring leads to better, more efficacious restudy decisions, reflected in better memory performance--we refer to this causal chain as the "restudy selectivity hypothesis". In 3 sets of experiments, we tested this hypothesis by factorially manipulating…

Individuals' memory experiences typically covary with those of others' around them, and on average, an item is more likely to be familiar if a companion recommends it as such. Although it would be ideal if observers could use the external recommendations of others' as statistical priors during recognition decisions, it is currently unclear how or…