Separation Of Consciousness And Unconsciousness Contributions From Fok Judgments

Feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgment refers to the mode of expressingknowledge about unrecalled information —although we don't possessenough information to recall the item, it is possible to indicate whether wecould recognize it. Reder(1987,1988)speculated that feeling-of-knowingwas a more general process that occurs automatically when a question wasasked, to help regulate strategy selection. According to the dual-processtheory on metamemory-monitoring, we assumed that FOK, a key indictorto metamemory-monitoring process, were based on two sources of process:implicit-automatic and explicit-controlled processes. By combining thegame show paradigm with the concise procedure of process dissociation,we attempted to develop a scientific method to separate the contribution ofconsciousness and unconsciousness to FOK. This study consisted of twoexperiments. Results of the first one showed that the method applied toseparate the contribution might be basically feasible. Moreover, though thereliability of results should be further testified, we found that consciousnessand unconsciousness both contributed to FOK(R=0.08, A=0.23), andunconsciousness occupied a more essential role in it. Afterward the secondexperiment was designed to validate them by changing materials, modify--ing the method and improving the procedure etc. Eventually, the resultssuggested that the improved method could be effectively applied to separatethe contribution. And the data were more stable and reliable—conscious--ness and unconsciousness both determine the FOK judgment with thecontribution increasing(R=0.14, A=0.44), and the role of unconsciousnessis more outstanding. With these two experiments, we explored the methodused in separating the contribution, and then validated the assumptions. Inthe end, we discussed these results deeply.