Metacognition and Memory Lab

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Welcome to the Metacognition and Memory Lab at Columbia University

We are currently studying people's metacognitions of agency; that is, their judgments about the degree to which they are the cause of events around them. We are investigating this primarily using a game-like paradigm in which participants move a cursor to try to "catch" stimuli as they are falling down the screen. The degree to which the movement of the cursor on the screen corresponds to participants' mouse movements is manipulated in a variety of ways. We then analyze how these manipulations influence the judgments of agency that participants make at the end of each game trial.

While we began this line of research with normals, we have expanded it to include samples of children, older adults, schizophrenia patients, Asperger patients, and methamphetamine users. In addition, we recently completed a functional brain imaging study that involved having participants complete our agency paradigm in an MRI scanner.

Click here for a list of agency publications from our lab.

METACOGNITIVE ILLUSION OF KNOWING
Post-doc Bridgid Finn investigates the inaccuracies in metacognitive judgments and how these inaccuracies influence subsequent behavior such as learning behavior. People are typically overconfident when making metacognitive judgments about the probability of correctly retrieving a target during a cued recall test. These judgments are overconfident only during the first study-judgment-test trial and shift towards underconfidence during following trials. Studies indicate that the underconfidence effect may be due to memory of one's item-specific performance on the preceding trial, and a failure to adequately take into account new current-trial learning. Current research is focused on how judgments of learning and study choice are influenced by framing effects.

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METACOGNITION IN CHILDREN

We are also very excited about our research on 3rd and 5th grade elementary school students in collaboration with Lisa Son at Barnard College. We are testing how these students make a wide variety of metacognitive judgments. We're currently focusing on judgments of how well they've learned new material, and how, with these judgments in mind, they choose which items they feel they need to study before they are tested.

We teach and test the children using a fun computer program in which the Dragon Master (voiced by Matthew Greene) leads the kids through the studying and testing process. The children are awarded treasure for correct answers, which allows them to progress through the many stages of dragondom, from a mere egg to the scourge of the skies!