Metacognitive awareness of VSTM performance becomes less accurate with age but remains well above chance across the adult life span¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associationalr3·q3
Currency · newest study 2018 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2023: baselines and conditions change
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q3 i? The trial-wise correlation between confidence and actual error weakened with age, with printed correlations of r = -0.23 unadjusted, r = -0.14 after sensorimotor adjustment, and r = -0.08 after adjusting for VSTM performance. → Daniel J. Mitchell 2018
Evidence¶
Daniel J. Mitchell 2018¶
Daniel J. Mitchell, Cam-CAN (Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience), Rhodri Cusack. (2018). Visual Short-Term Memory Through the Lifespan: Preserved Benefits of Context and Metacognition. Psychology and Aging. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000265
q3 · i? · associational · r3
Correlational analysis of metacognitive awareness (confidence-error partial correlation) against age in the Cam-CAN sample, run with and without sensorimotor and VSTM-performance adjustment. The decline was minimal after adjusting for VSTM performance.
"metacognitive judgments were found to become less accurately predictive of performance with age (without adjusting for performance: r = −0.23, p < .001; after adjusting for sensorimotor performance: r = −0.14, p < .001; after adjusting for VSTM (RMSE) performance: r = −0.08, p < .05), but on average remained well above chance across the age range"
Discussion¶
Learner Variables¶
- Self-Regulation — outcome: instruction changes it
Related Claims¶
- Better metacognitive awareness of trial-to-trial VSTM performance is associated with lower error, higher precision, and fewer misbinding errors, but not with item capacity, and this association is invariant across age — related
- At low memory loads, older adults report less uncertainty than younger adults despite making larger errors, suggesting an overconfidence bias — related
- VSTM performance declines with advancing adult age in raw error, item capacity, precision, and misbinding, even after adjusting for sensorimotor performance — related
- Aging does not materially reduce the relative accuracy (resolution) of judgments of learning during encoding, with cross-sectional evidence of no age declines and even age-related increases in aggregate JOL resolution across ages 18 to 81 — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
metacognitive-accuracy-declines-slightly-with-age |
title |
Metacognitive awareness of VSTM performance becomes less accurate with age but remains well above chance across the adult life span |
description |
Metacognitive awareness of VSTM performance becomes less accurate with age but remains well above chance across the adult life span |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
moderate |
newest_evidence |
2018 |
recheck_by |
2023 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-17 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — daniel-j-mitchell-2018 |
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