Confident failures: Lapses of working memory reveal a metacognitive blind spot

Blind Spot May Reveal Vacuum Radiation

The influence of lapses of attention on working memory capacity.

In three experiments, the influence of lapses of attention on working memory (WM) capacity measures was examined. Participants performed various change detection tasks while also reporting whether they were focused on the current task or whether they were unfocused and mind-wandering. Participants reported that they were mind-wandering roughly 27% of the time, and when participants reported min...

A metacognitive visuospatial working memory training for children

The paper studies whether visuospatial working memory (VSWM) and, specifically, recall of sequential-spatial information, can be improved by metacognitive training. Twenty-two fourth-grade children were involved in seven sessions of sequential-spatial memory training, while twenty-four children attended lessons given by their teacher. The posttraining evaluation demonstrated a specific improvem...

Age Differences in Attention Lapses Mask Age Differences in Memory Failures: A Methodological Note on Suppression

Although objective measures of memory performance typically indicate memory declines with age, self-reported memory failures often show no relation to age. In contrast, self-reported attention failures are reliably negatively correlated with age. This contrast suggests the possibility that age-related awareness and reporting of memory failures might be masked by a concurrent decrease in attenti...

Recovering from Main-Memory Lapses

Recovery activities like logging checkpointing and restart are used to restore a database to a consistent state after a system crash has occurred Recovery related overhead is likely to form a bottleneck in a main memory database since I O activities are performed for the sole purpose of ensuring data durability In this paper we present recovery algorithms which reduce recovery related overheads...