The Effects Of Depletion Of Executive Functions On Accuracy Of Judgment Of Learning

The individual’s autonomous learning ability is much studied at the moment, and the study of metacognition has become one of the popular topics of psychological research, especially on the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring, such as judgment of learning (namely JOL). The factors affecting the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring are mainly based on the cue-utilization model proposed by Koriat previously, which focused on the properties of learning material as well as the subjective experience of learning, and individual differences are overlooked. Recently, the concept of executive functions (EFs, also known as executive control or cognitive control) is introduced to the field of metacognition research, and this individual variable has received much attention from researchers. Some researches have pointed out that both of the concepts are similar, and based on the same physiological basis of the prefrontal cortex. A large number of empirical evidences also show that metacognitive monitoring and individual’s executive functions are closely related.But there are following deficiencies existed in the past research:most of the research measured the individual’s executive functions and metacognitive monitoring performance at the same time, and adopt the method of correlation and regression analysis. These studies are lacking in the manipulation on individual’s executive functions, thus cannot attain direct evidences on the effect of executive functions on the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring; the definition of the executive functions is general to the most part, researches used a composite score to represent the executive functions, and few studied the subcomponents of the executive functions; the selection of the experimental subjects are special, such as elderly and patients, lacking in generability.Studies have shown that the executive functions will take up individual’s limited self-control resources, and the depletion of the self-control resources will affect the performance of the following advanced cognitive process. And the self-depletion paradigm can be used to manipulate individual’s executive functions directly. Accordingly, the present study takes young people (college students) as the subjects, and uses the self-depletion paradigm to further explore the relationship between executive functions and the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring (represents judgment of learning in the study), in order to provide direct evidences for the effect of executive functions on metacognitive monitoring.Regard to the three subcomponents of executive functions, including attention switching, memory updating and inhibitory control. Three parallel experiments were designed, in order to study the effect of the depletion of different subcomponents of executive functions on the accuracy of judgment of learning. Experiment 1 explored the effects of the depletion of attention switching on the accuracy of judgment of learning, and found it will affect relative accuracy of judgment of learning, but no effect on absolute accuracy. Compared with the non-switching group, the relative accuracy of judgment of learning of the switching group is significant lower. Experiment 2 explored the effects of the depletion of memory updating on the accuracy of judgment of learning, and found no effect both on relative accuracy and absolute accuracy of judgment of learning. The experiment 3 explored the effects of the depletion of inhibitory control on the accuracy of judgment of learning, and also found no effect both on relative accuracy and absolute accuracy of judgment of learning.The conclusion of the present study were as follows:the attention switching component of executive functions have a direct impact on judgment of learning, and the ability of attention switching may be the core to whether the judgment of learning is accurate; the memory updating component and inhibitory control component of executive functions have no direct impact on judgment of learning.