On interpreting the relationship between remember-know judgments and confidence: The role of instructions

Two experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that the nature of the remember-know instructions given to participants influences whether these responses reflect different memory states or different degrees of memory confidence. Participants studied words and nonwords, a variable that has been shown to dissociate confidence from remember-know judgments and were given a set of published remember-know instructions that either emphasized know judgments as highly confident (Experiment 1) or as less confident (Experiment 2) states of recognition. Experiment 1 replicated the standard finding showing that remembering and knowing were differently influenced by the word-nonword variable, whereas confidence responses were not. By contrast, Experiment 2 showed a similar pattern of data for remember-know and sure-unsure responses, thus demonstrating the importance of the instructions for interpreting the relationship between remembering and knowing and confidence. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.