How easy is it to judge ease of learning?

Abstract

In two experiments, we asked college students to judge the ease of learning word pairs known to differ reliably in actual ease of learning. The independent variable in both experiments was the rate of presentation (fast and slow) of to-be-judged items. The results of both experiments revealed only small differences in decision accuracy as a function of presentation rate. This suggests that metacognitive judgments of this kind rely on rather fundamental cognitive processes, which in our view are similar to those used to discover meaning in everyday verbal messages. © 1991, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.