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Retrospective confidence ratings (hereafter, “confidence ratings”) and judgments of learning (JOLs; a type of prospective confidence rating) are common measures used to assess metamemory monitoring, but they are used for different purposes. JOLs ask subjects to predict future memory performance, whereas confidence ratings ask subjects to assess how accurate they were on a task they just completed. We are studying whether confidence ratings or JOLs are more accurate at predicting future performance and what factors may be contributing to the difference in accuracy. Our previous studies suggested little to no difference between rating types. Our third experiment builds off of the first three in this research line by adding in a new pre-retrieval JOL condition while investigating two cues—retrieval fluency and projected retention interval. The addition of cues aims to investigate the psychological mechanism by which people make confidence ratings and JOLs. This experiment is a follow-up from three previously registered projects. We are updating our hypotheses and adding additional measures.

Our study will be based on Shrikanth, Szpunar & Szpunar’s 2018 study of personal and collective future thought. In that study, participants were given a short time to generate a list of things in the future that they were either personality excited or worried about, or to generate a list of things that their country was either excited or worried about. Recent research has revealed that thinking about one’s personal future yields more positive thoughts, while thinking about the collective future of one’s country yields more negative thoughts. Our research aims to replicate these results and add a cross-cultural dimension. As future thinking has been hypothesized to depend heavily on past memories, we expect that people with more positive views of the past will have more positive views of their country’s future. Critically, past research (Liu et al., 2009) suggests that while most people have negative views of their country’s history, some countries, like China, tend to have more positive views of the past. By having both participants from China and the US complete Shrikanth et al.’s collective future thought task we hope to show that the positive / negative dissociation that occurs with American participants will not replicate with Chinese participant. This page contains materials, data, and analysis scripts, along with links to the preregistrations for each experiment.