Knowing That You Don't Know: Metamemory and Discourse Processing

In 6 experiments, the authors used a speeded question-answering task and a recognition task to examine how people know what they don't know. Extending work by S. Glucksberg and M. McCloskey (1981) to examine metamemory judgments about narratives, the authors asked participants to respond to 2 types of "don't know" questions. In certain conditions, readers were faster to respond "don't know" to implicit "don't know" questions (i.e., no information regarding the answers was provided) than to explicit "don't know" questions (i.e., narratives explicitly stated that something was unknown). The speed of responding to the implicit "don't know" questions was related to the familiarity of the question, which is consistent with claims that fast metacognitive judgments are based on a preliminary evaluation of the familiarity of a cue. This is a first step in integrating theories of metacognition and discourse processing.