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Correcting experience-based judgments: the perseverance of subjective experience in the face of the correction of judgment

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Abstract

Many of our cognitive and metacognitive judgments are based on sheer subjective experience. Subjective experience, however, may be contaminated by irrelevant factors, resulting in biased judgments. Under certain conditions people exert a metacognitive correction process to remedy such biased judgments. In this study we examine the proposition that even after a judgment has been corrected to avoid the biasing effects on subjective experience, subjective experience itself remains biased. We asked participants to judge the difficulty of anagrams for others. When they were aware of having been exposed to the solutions of some of the anagrams, they corrected their difficulty judgments for these anagrams. Despite this correction, their speeded choices in a subsequent task disclosed their biased subjective experience that these anagrams were easier to solve. Implications for the study of metacognition and for the educational domain are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Practically the same pattern of results was found when all responses (i.e., those in the range 250–3000 ms) were included in the analysis.

  2. Hereafter we would use the term ‘Anagram Type’ as shorthand for the term ‘Type of Target Anagram’.

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Acknowledgements

This study was conducted at the Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. We gratefully acknowledge support for this research by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the framework of German-Israeli Project Cooperation (DIP). We thank Limor Sheffer for her help in the analyses of the data.

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Correspondence to Ravit Nussinson.

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Ravit Nussinson has previously published under the name Ravit Levy-Sadot.

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Nussinson, R., Koriat, A. Correcting experience-based judgments: the perseverance of subjective experience in the face of the correction of judgment. Metacognition Learning 3, 159–174 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-008-9024-2

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