Murphy Dillon H, Stefanidi Aikaterini, Brewer Gene A
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2025 Aug 6. doi: 10.3758/s13421-025-01772-3.
People frequently rely on subjective assessments of importance to navigate daily decisions, yet the psychological underpinnings of these judgments are not fully understood. Crucially, non-diagnostic factors, such as memory accessibility, may skew these evaluations. The present study examined the interplay between memory outcomes and judgments of importance. Participants engaged in a memory test involving 20 scientific theories, followed by assessments of each theory's importance. Results revealed a bias whereby successfully recalled theories were deemed more important than those not recalled. Additionally, even in the case of retrieval failure, metacognitive feelings of knowing positively correlated with importance judgments. Finally, when memory was tested via recognition, which lowers retrieval difficulty, this importance bias was diminished, indicating that the effort or challenge of retrieval may be used as a cue for importance. Across these experiments, a consistent pattern emerged (recalled information was considered more important than forgotten information) that aligns with the hypothesis that memory accessibility and subjective judgments of importance are intertwined. Thus, people may deem things they remember as having higher importance and things they forget as having less importance, based in part on the degree of memory accessibility which is not necessarily a valid indicator of the true status of that information's value.
人们在日常决策中常常依赖对重要性的主观评估，然而这些判断的心理基础尚未得到充分理解。至关重要的是，诸如记忆可及性等非诊断性因素可能会扭曲这些评估。本研究考察了记忆结果与重要性判断之间的相互作用。参与者进行了一项涉及20个科学理论的记忆测试，随后对每个理论的重要性进行评估。结果显示出一种偏差，即成功回忆起的理论被认为比未被回忆起的理论更重要。此外，即使在检索失败的情况下，元认知的知晓感也与重要性判断呈正相关。最后，当通过识别测试记忆时，检索难度降低，这种重要性偏差就会减弱，这表明检索的努力或挑战可能被用作重要性的线索。在这些实验中，出现了一种一致的模式（被回忆起的信息被认为比被遗忘的信息更重要），这与记忆可及性和重要性主观判断相互交织的假设相符。因此，人们可能会认为他们记住的事情具有更高的重要性，而忘记的事情重要性较低，这部分是基于记忆可及性的程度，而这不一定是该信息价值真实状况的有效指标。
