Cue familiarity and ‘don’t know’ responding in episodic memory tasks

• Cue familiarity affects metacognitive monitoring at retrieval.
• We show that familiarity of a cue also determines if an answer is volunteered.
• Decisions to volunteer the answers shape the contents and accuracy of a report.
• Monitoring at retrieval is related to decisions made in a memory task.

Metacognitive monitoring and control are two interdependent mechanisms by which people regulate encoding and retrieval processes in memory. While much is known about monitoring, and how the results of monitoring processes affect control at encoding, much less evidence is available for the monitoring–control relationship with respect to the regulation of retrieval. The present study provides information on this point by assessing whether a factor that is known to affect metacognitive monitoring at retrieval, i.e. cue familiarity, affects also metacognitive control at retrieval (i.e. the decision to volunteer or withhold a response in a memory task). In seven experiments cue familiarity was manipulated by having participants make a pleasantness judgment beforehand for half of the critical cues. Results showed that cue familiarity affected not only metacognitive judgments of feeling-of-knowing and retrospective confidence, but also the rate of ‘don’t know’ responses in different recognition tasks. These results demonstrate that a factor known to affect metacognitive monitoring determines also the decision to volunteer or withhold a response (metacognitive control), which in turn shapes participants’ performance in a memory task.