Examining what prestudy and immediate judgments of learning reveal about the bases of metamemory judgments

- Different mechanisms underlie prestudy JOLs and immediate JOLs.
- Immediate JOLs are more affected by relatedness and font manipulations than are prestudy JOLs.
- Immediate JOLs more accurately track performance than do prestudy JOLs.
- These patterns hold using different types of designs, supporting the differences in judgments.

Across three experiments we examined the basis for participants' judgments of learning (JOLs) - memory beliefs or fluency - by manipulating item relatedness and font size and collecting prestudy JOLs, immediate JOLs, or both types (combination) of JOLs. Experiment 3 also measured self-paced study time as an indirect measure of participants' perceived fluency of items. All three experiments revealed higher prestudy, immediate, and combination JOLs for related, and large font items than for unrelated, or small font items. However, combination conditions suggested that prestudy and immediate JOLs are not identical. Prestudy and immediate JOLs differed both in terms of magnitude and accuracy, with higher magnitude and relative accuracy for immediate JOLs than prestudy JOLs in all three experiments, suggesting memory beliefs alone are not sufficient to accurately track memory performance. These results combine with the study time data in Experiment 3, which did not differ significantly as a function of font size, to suggest that memory beliefs influence both types of JOLs. However, as participants gained exposure to stimuli characteristics, immediate JOLs shifted more than prestudy JOLs, suggesting that the timing of immediate JOLs facilitates participants' analysis of fluency and other item qualities that affect recall, which are then factored into participants' immediate JOLs more so than prestudy JOLs.