Feeling-of-Knowing Judgments from the Subject's Perspective

We examined the manner in which subjects interpret experimenter-provided feeling-of-knowing (FOK) definitions. The original FOK definition proposed by Hart (1965) is a composite of two criteria: (1) A feeling that the sought-after information is known and (2) a feeling that the sought-after information can be correctly identified on a later criterion test. We hypothesized that subjects may use one or both of these criteria in reporting FOK states. We found that Goodman-Kruskal gamma correlations (Goodman & Kruskal, 1954) were substantially larger when subjects attended to the predictive aspect of FOK definitions relative to subjects who assessed what they believed they knew. We argue that FOKs are more accurate when task-relevant information is incorporated into the judgment. Finally, these data weaken a cue-familiarity interpretation of the FOK phenomenon.