Do older adults show less confidence in their monitoring of learning?

Although aging has a minimal effect on the accuracy of people's judgments of learning (JOLs) at predicting future memory performance, older adults may be less confident in these memory judgments--similar to the age declines often reported with memory self-efficacy. To evaluate this possibility, the authors had younger and older adults make JOLs for paired associates and rate their confidence in the accuracy of each JOL. Age-related declines in confidence in judgments were evident for immediate JOLs but not for delayed JOLs. Implications of these outcomes for theory of JOLs and explaining age-related differences in self-regulated study are discussed.