A frequent procedure used to study how individuals monitor their own learning is to collect judgments of learning (JOLs) during acquisition, considered to be important, in part, because such judgments are assumed to guide how individuals allocate their future learning resources. In such research, however, a tacit assumption is frequently made:…

A prominent finding in recognition memory is that studied items are associated with more variability in memory strength than new items. Here, we test 3 competing theories for why this occurs--the "encoding variability," "attention failure", and "recollection" accounts. Distinguishing among these theories is critical…