Intuition and metacognition: The effect of semantic coherence on judgments of learning

The idea that two distinct modes of thought affect human cognition and behavior has received considerable attention in psychology. In the domain of metacognition, it is assumed that metacognitive judgments are based on both nonanalytic, experience-based processes and analytic, theory-based processes. This study examined whether the experience-based process of intuition underlies people’s predictions of their future memory performance (judgments of learning; JOLs). In four experiments, people made JOLs and took a test on compound remote associates, that is, groups of 3 words that were either remote associates of a single solution word (coherent triads) or had no common associate (incoherent triads). Previous research has shown that increased fluency of processing coherent triads produces brief positive affects that may underlie judgments. In all experiments, JOLs were higher for coherent than for incoherent triads. The same was true for recognition memory and free recall performance. Moreover, Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that coherent triads were processed more fluently (i.e., read more quickly) than incoherent triads. Finally, Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the effect of semantic coherence on JOLs occurred for participants who were aware and unaware of relations between all three triad words, but was more pronounced for aware participants. In sum, this study demonstrates that intuition impacts JOLs over and above theory-based processes.