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The self-generation effect refers to the finding that people's memory for information tends to be better when they generate it themselves. Counterintuitively, when proofreading, this effect may make it more difficult to detect mistakes in one's own writing than in others' writing. We investigated the self-generation effect and sources of individual differences in proofreading performance in two eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 failed to reveal a self-generation effect. Experiment 2 used a studying manipulation to induce overfamiliarity for self-generated text, revealing a weak but non-significant self-generation effect. Overall, word errors (i.e., wrong words) were detected less often than non-word errors (i.e., misspellings), and function word errors were detected less often than content word errors. Fluid intelligence predicted proofreading performance, whereas reading comprehension, working memory capacity, processing speed, and indicators of miserly cognitive processing did not. Students who made more text fixations and spent more time proofreading detected more errors., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Multitasking is ubiquitous in everyday life, which means there is value in developing measures that predict successful multitasking performance. In a large sample (N = 404 contributing data), we examined the predictive and incremental validity of placekeeping, which is the ability to perform a sequence of operations in a certain order without omissions or repetitions. In the context of multitasking, placekeeping should play a role in the performance of procedural subtasks and the interleaving of subtasks that interrupt each other. Regression analyses revealed that placekeeping ability accounted for 11% of the variance in multitasking performance, and had incremental validity relative to each of a diverse set of cognitive abilities (working memory capacity, fluid intelligence, perceptual speed, and crystallized intelligence). The predictive validity of placekeeping for multitasking was stable across samples of performance and robust to placekeeping practice. Broader measures of performance on our placekeeping task accounted for 21% of the variance in multitasking performance and had incremental validity relative to an estimate of psychometric g. The results provide evidence that placekeeping is a distinct cognitive ability with its own specific role to play in multitasking, and raise the possibility that measures of placekeeping ability could have utility in selecting personnel for occupations that require certain kinds of multitasking, such as interleaving of procedures.