We investigated lifespan differences of confidence calibration in episodic memory, particularly the susceptibility to high-confidence errors within samples of children, teenagers, younger adults, and older adults. Using an associative recognition memory paradigm, we drew a direct link between older adults' associative deficit and high-confidence errors. We predicted that only older adults would...

An essential feature of human memory is the capacity to assess confidence in one's own memory performance, but the neural mechanisms underlying the process of determining confidence in memory performance have not yet been isolated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined both the process of confidence assessment and the subjective level of high or low confidence expressed durin...

Recent studies have asked whether activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and the neocortex can distinguish true memory from false memory. A frequent complication has been that the confidence associated with correct memory judgments (true memory) is typically higher than the confidence associated with incorrect memory judgments (false memory). Accordingly, it has often been difficult to know...

The capacity to learn and remember surely evolved to help animals solve problems in their quest to reproduce and survive. In humans we assume that metacognitive processes also evolved, so that we know when to trust what we remember (i.e., when we have high confidence in our memories) and when not to (when we have low confidence). However this latter feature has been questioned by researchers, w...