Metacognition Flashcards
What are the consistent findings of calibration on different types of tasks?
People have higher overconfidence on difficult items and underconfidence on easier items. They are more overconfident on general knowledge items. They are underconfident on visual sensory tasks. Reasonable calibration has been shown on reasoning tasks (RPM).
What are the causes of miscalibration?
Heuristics and biases: people do not have complete information so they use shortcuts and pre-existing schemas to make a judgement. These are also incomplete, therefore confidence ratings are predisposed to being incorrect. e.g. Representativeness heuristic - judgement based on how something is representative of the stereotype of a group to which it belongs.
Ecological reasons: the experimenter creates conditions that are conducive to miscalibration as they are not representative of the participants’ environment. Experiments oversample trick items which use cues that lead to the wrong answer, leading to over/underconfidence. Probabilistic mental model theory: when people are unsure of the answer, they use a cue and retrieve the frequency at which this predicts a criterion. Cue validity refers to the frequency at which the cue predicts the correct answer. Ecological validity refers to whether the cue currently leads to the correct answer. If people are more familiar with the environment, the cue validity would become more equivalent to ecological validity.
Random error: mathematical explanation for random errors in judgement and regression to the mean
Individual differences: some people might be more susceptible to miscalibration than others.
How are feedback, age and gender related to confidence ratings?
Feedback provided after each item and overall does not significantly affect CR. Older people are more confidence and overconfident. Fs less confident than Ms, but this is not a consistent finding.
What are the gender differences in work, education, science, work-related training?
Women are employed in less productive and low paying jobs. This is attributed to differences in the education and type of industry that women gravitate towards, such as nurturing jobs and avoid STEM. Men are twice as likely as women to have full time jobs and are paid more for their first job. Women are mostly employed as administration workers, sales assistants, community workers and professionals, while men work in trades and managerial positions. Motherhood is a barrier towards climbing the ladder towards senior positions in a company. Women are less likely to supervise scientific journal publications and write fewer papers. However, they write more papers in fields that are dominated by women such as psychology. They are less likely to publish work independently. Women also participate less in non-formal training and cite personal/family reasons as the biggest reason for this. In educational achievement, boys are found to do slightly better than girls and a greater proportion of boys are low performers and very high performers (there is greater variance). The distribution is less extreme for girls. Females score higher in tests of spelling, language, speech production while males score higher on spatial ability, mechanical reasoning, mental rotation.
What are the metacogntive factors that contribute to gender differences in education?
Women tend to have lower confidence even when they are doing well. They are more anxious towards certain subjects such as mathematics, and this leads to lower performance than males. This can be attributed to stereotype susceptibility, such that when girls are primed with their female identity, they score lower on a maths test. Test performance can be affected by sociocultural pressures and expectations. The maths self-concept is lower for girls, which impacts their motivation, learning and career choices.
Compare the older and recent approaches to the study of exceptional abilities.
Initially, giftedness was believed to be largely inherited. Recently, it is a combination of learning, practice and training acquired throughout life. Gifted individuals become experts by starting early and engaging in high quality, deliberate practice - repetitions with refinement. However, innate talent sets the limit of performance, therefore aptitude does play a role in the development of special abilities in domains that are complex.
How do abilities, motivation, personality and home environment predict giftedness?
General intelligence predicts exceptional achievement at school, higher education and research. People with psychomotor and perceptual abilities excel in sports and arts. People who are more creative tend to have IQ > 125.
Task-oriented motivation stems from an individual’s intrinsic motivation to learn. It increases their perseverance, willingness to work hard, having ambitions and increases competitiveness. High achievers tend to have a better self-concept and understanding of their capabilities which allows them to set higher goals for themselves.
Gifted people are more independent, self-directed, willing to work alone, responsible, unconventional.
A home environment that encourages learning and achievement is another catalyst for success. Parents who expose their children to different experiences and give them the freedom to pursue their interests cultivate a positive environment for the expression of their talents.
What are the methodological problems with researching intelligence, ageing and health?
Factorial stability: when children are up to 4/5 yo, there is only a general factor of intelligence. Abilities (e.g. verbal, spatial) start to differentiate during childhood and adolescence. Crystallised and fluid intelligence is clearly defined by adulthood. As the structure of intelligence changes over time, if a test is given to young children and adults, there would be different measures of cognitive ability.
Cohort effects are present in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies: different generations had an emphasis on different types of abilities. e.g. curriculum that focuses on arithmetic would lead to better maths skills in the cohort. If different cohorts are better at specific abilities, than it might not be clear as to how ageing affects intelligence.
Death-drop effect: people show a drop in IQ before they die e.g. Gf in cross-sectional studies.
What are the major explanations for the decline in fluid intelligence during ageing?
- Speed of cognitive processing is slower: As the tasks become more complex, the speed difference between young and elderly become more pronounced. It is more difficult for older people to use the active part of their working memory to store and manipulate information.
- Cognitive capacity declines: The active part of WM is affected by ageing. It is more difficult to transform and manipulate information. They are able to recognise stimuli but find it more difficult to reproduce what they have learned. Older people have fewer processing resources for tasks that require high attentional demands and are mentally taxing.
How do diseases affect brain functioning?
- Cardiovascular diseases: poor blood circulation impairs the delivery of nutrients to brain cells, which is necessary for optimal functioning.
- Diabetes: accelerates the ageing process, they become tired, prone to fainting.
- Dementia: is not a normal part of ageing. It leads to memory loss, inability to think abstractly, make judgements.
- Nutrition: deficiencies in vitamins and minerals e.g. omega 3 (fish), vitamin E (antioxidants), B vitamins
What are the effects of educational interventions on intelligence during adolescence and adulthood?
- Practising many items over consecutive days increases the number of items that can be solved. However, little change in IQ.
- Coaching students how to take tests well increases scores on SAT by approx. 2 IQ points. It does not appear to have significant effects on intelligence.
- Training (Kvashchev experiment) involves teaching a skill that can be generalised to another task. Training on creative problem solving increased IQ by more than 8 points, and Gc gained 24%, Gf increased 22%.
