Metacognition and Memory for Nonoccurrence

A familiar hypothesis about the recognition of distractor items as "new" is that it depends heavily on a metacognitive strategy in which the memorability or salience of the distractor is evaluated: if the item was deemed salient or memorable and yet no memory trace for it can be found, then it must not have been studied (e.g. Strack & Bless, 1994). In four experiments, no evidence was found to support this metamemory hypothesis. Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2 demonstrated that the judged salience of the stimuli did not predict participants' recognition judgements for distractors. In Experiments 3a and 3b, instructional manipulations designed to affect the ostensible metacognitive process failed to affect the recognition judgements. Finally, Experiment 4 indicated that confidence judgements do not support the predictions of the metamemory hypothesis.