Metacognitive monitoring during category learning: how success affects future behaviour

摘要

The purpose of the present study was to examine how people’s perceptions of their own learning, during a category learning task, matched their performance. In two experiments, participants were asked to learn natural categories, of both high and low variability, and make category learning judgments (CLJs). Variability was manipulated by varying the number of exemplars and the number of times each exemplar was presented within each category. Experiment 1 showed that participants were generally overconfident in their knowledge of low variability families, suggesting that they considered repetition to be more useful for learning than it actually was. CLJs had the largest increase when a trial was correct following an incorrect trial and the largest decrease when an incorrect trial followed a correct trial. Experiment 2 replicated these results, but also demonstrated that global CLJ ratings showed the same bias toward repetition.