Title: Aging and Metacognitive Updating: Can We Improve Self-Awareness?
Tesnim Arar, doctoral student in the Gallo Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago
Abstract: Metacognition, or knowledge of one’s cognitive processes and abilities, is a critical component of self-regulation. Given this relationship between metacognition and behavior, researchers have argued that enhancing the accuracy of our metacognitive beliefs is an antecedent to improving behavior, and this may be especially true for older adults. Yet despite the potential value of harnessing metacognitive beliefs to mitigate negative aging-induced effects on behavior, one vital question remains unanswered: How does aging affect metacognition? One hypothesis is that aging spares metacognitive monitoring—or the ability to evaluate one’s cognitive performance on laboratory or everyday tasks in real-time—but impairs older adults’ capacity to update self-representations in memory. Another hypothesis is that older adults’ inaccurate metacognitive beliefs—when found—may arise not from impaired memory processes, but rather, a positivity bias, or a tendency to avoid incorporating recent task experiences into their self-representations because these experiences are presumably more negative. Here, we evaluate both these hypotheses via a feedback paradigm. Younger and older adults took a cognitive battery and received feedback, presented as percentiles, on their performance. We then examined whether this task-specific feedback induced updates in their everyday metacognitive beliefs at various delays. We found evidence that both groups can update and improve their metacognitive beliefs for up to two weeks, but several factors moderated this effect.
Time: 01/15/25 3:30 PM
Location: Biopsychological Sciences Building atrium
If you have any questions, requests, and concerns, please contact Nakwon Rim (nwrim [at] uchicago [dot] edu) or Cambria Revsine (crevsine [at] uchicago [dot] edu).