Aging and Confidence Judgments in Item Recognition

We examined the effects of aging on performance in an item-recognition experiment with confidence judgments. A model for confidence judgments and response time (RTs; Ratcliff & Starns, 2013) was used to fit a large amount of data from a new sample of older adults and a previously reported sample...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2018-01, Vol.44 (1), p.1-23
Main Authors: Voskuilen, Chelsea, Ratcliff, Roger, McKoon, Gail
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Adult
Age Differences
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Aging
Aging (Individuals)
Aging - physiology
Comparative Analysis
Decision making
Decision Making Skills
Evaluative Thinking
Experimental psychology
Experiments
Familiarity
Human
Humans
Judgment
Judgment - physiology
Memory
Metacognition
Metacognition - physiology
Middle Aged
Models, Psychological
Object Recognition
Older Adults
Older people
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Reaction Time
Reaction Time - physiology
Recognition (Psychology)
Recognition (Psychology) - physiology
Self-Confidence
Statistical Analysis
Task Analysis
Undergraduate Students
Word Lists
Word Recognition
Young Adult
Young Adults
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Summary:We examined the effects of aging on performance in an item-recognition experiment with confidence judgments. A model for confidence judgments and response time (RTs; Ratcliff & Starns, 2013) was used to fit a large amount of data from a new sample of older adults and a previously reported sample of younger adults. This model of confidence judgments allows us to distinguish between changes evidence from memory and changes in decision-related components and it accounts for both RT distributions and response proportions. Older adults took longer to respond than younger adults, older adults exhibited a small decrease in the strength of evidence from memory compared with younger adults and a slight bias toward judging items as "old." The difference in RTs between the 2 age groups was primarily explained by the difference in the nondecision component. Although our small sample size makes the general conclusions about aging tentative, the results are consistent with other research examining the effects of aging in two-choice RT tasks and response-signal tasks, and the study demonstrates that confidence judgment choice proportion and RT distribution data from older adults can be fit with the response time and confidence 2 (RTCON2) model.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/xlm0000425