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Concept information

phenomenon > metamemory phenomenon > foresight bias

Preferred term

foresight bias  

Definition

  • A metamemory phenomenon, leading to a form of illusion of competence, observed when a person overestimates the future performance of his memory in cases where an inherent discrepancy exists between the learning situation and the test situation (Koriat & Bjork, 2005).

Broader concept

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Bibliographic citation(s)

  • • Koriat, A., & Bjork, R. A. (2005). Illusions of competence in monitoring one’s knowledge during study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(2), 187-194. https://doi./org/10.1037/0278-7393.31.2.187

    • Document type: empirical study

    • Access: closed

Creator

  • Frank Arnould

Example

  • For example, Koariat & Bjork (2005, Experiment 2) asked people to learn word pairs. After each pair, participants were asked to indicate how likely they thought they would be able to recall the second word in the pair using the first as a cue (judgment of learning). The word pairs were constructed using either forward or backward associations. For example, in English, the “umbrella-rain” pair is based on a forward association because, according to verbal association data, the probability of the word “umbrella” eliciting the word “rain” is high. In contrast, the reverse pair “rain-umbrella” relies on a backward association because the probability of the word “rain” to elicit the word umbrella is low. At the time of testing, the first word of each pair was presented to the subjects who had to remember the word associated with it. The results showed that participants judged that they would remember the words of the forward pairs just as well as the backward pairs. Yet, in reality, they remembered the forward pairs better and thus subjectively exaggerated their ability to remember the backward pairs.

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URI

http://data.loterre.fr/ark:/67375/P66-FW2KQBFZ-4

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