The Production Effect On Judgments Of Learning: The Contributions Of Proccessing Fluency And People’s Beliefs About Memory

The production effect is the substantial benefit to memory of having studied information aloud as opposed to silently. Researches suggest that production is an effective way of learning which can significantly improve individual’s memory performance. According to the theory of Nelson and Narens, the process of cognition could be divided into two levels:the objective-level of cognition and the meta-level of cognition. Considering the effect of production on the process of the objective-level, so will it still have an impact on the process of meta-cognition? Castel and his colleges expanded the range of the production effect to the process of meta-cognition. In their research, words that participants learned through different ways of reading were received higher JOLs than words that participants read silently. That is, production does not only influence subject’s performance in memory, but also affect their judgments of learning. However, the mechanism underling the effect of production on JOLs is still unknown. The research about how production affect metamemory will help us to have a better knowledge of how people monitor their own learning and provide further evidences to support the opinion that production plays an important role in metacognitive process.Previous research has showed that processing fluency and people’s beliefs about memory have a great influence on JOLs. The former means the ease of processing an item. The later means people’s opinions about their own memory activities and any factors that impact these activities. We hypothesized that the production effect on JOLs might depend on these two factors:namely processing fluency and people’s beliefs about memory. In experiment l, we examined the effect of production on JOLs by using single-factor within-subjects design. The findings showed that words read aloud were received higher JOLs than ones read silently, reflecting the production effect on JOLs. In experiment 2, we examined the contribution of processing fluency, which is measured by self-paced study time, to the production effect on JOLs. The findings of experiment 2 showed no significant difference in self-paced study time between words read aloud and words read silently. In experiment 3a and experiment 3b, we turned to examine people’s belief about production. In order to explore people’s beliefs, in experiment 3a, participants were required to read a description of the procedure in experiment 1 and predicted recall performance for words read aloud and for words read silently. The results of experiment 3a showed that participants gave higher estimates to words read aloud than to ones read silently. In experiment 3b, we evaluated whether the effect occurred for prestudy JOLs, which were made prior to studying the to-be-learned words and hence could not be affected by processing fluency. The results of experiment 3b showed that words read aloud were received higher pre-study JOLs than ones read silently. And the results of metamemory serial position analysis revealed that the main effects of study method and serial position were significant, but the interaction between study method and serial position was not significant.Conclusions were as followed:(1) Production affect both people’s memory and their judgments of learning. Namely, production is used as a cue for meta-memory judgments, with words that read aloud received higher JOLs than ones that read silently.(2) Processing fluency, which is measured by self-paced study time, cannot mediate the relationship between production and JOLs.(3) People’s beliefs about how production affect memory contributes substantially to the production effect on JOLs.