Older adults recover more marginal knowledge and use feedback more effectively than younger adults: evidence using "I don't know" vs. "I don't remember" for general knowledge questions.

Through three experiments, we examined older and younger adults' metacognitive ability to distinguish between what is not stored in the knowledge base versus merely inaccessible. Difficult materials were selected to test this ability when retrieval failures were very frequent. Of particular interest was the influence of feedback (and lack thereof) in potential new learning and recovery of marginal knowledge across age groups. Participants answered short-answer general knowledge questions, responding "I do not know" (DK) or "I do not remember" (DR) when retrieval failed. After DKs, performance on a subsequent multiple-choice (Exp. 1) and short-answer test following correct-answer feedback (Exp. 2) was lower than after DRs, supporting self-reported not remembering reflects failures of accessibility whereas not knowing captures a lack of availability. Yet, older adults showed a tendency to answer more DK questions correctly on the final tests than younger adults. Experiment 3 was a replication and extension of Experiment 2 including two groups of online participants in which one group was not provided correct answer feedback during the initial short-answer test. This allowed us to examine the degree to which any new learning and recovery of access to marginal knowledge was occurring across the age groups. Together, the findings indicate that (1) metacognitive awareness regarding underlying causes of retrieval failures is maintained across different distributions of knowledge accessibility, (2) older adults use correct answer feedback more effectively than younger adults, and (3) in the absence of feedback, older adults spontaneously recover marginal knowledge.

Lay Definitions of Intelligence, Knowledge, and Memory: Inter- and Independence of Constructs.

The present study examined how lay participants define the following concepts used widely in psychology: being intelligent, knowing, and remembering. In the scientific community, knowledge overlaps with the contents of semantic memory, crystallized intelligence reflects the accumulation of knowledge, knowledge and event memory interact, and fluid intelligence and working memory correlate. Naturally, the lay public has implicit theories of these constructs. These theories mainly distinguish between intelligent and unintelligent behaviors and tend to include characteristics outside psychometric studies of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence. Here, we asked lay participants from the online platform Prolific to explain "what does being intelligent mean to you?" as well as "knowing" and "remembering" to understand their degree of alignment with theoretical conceptualizations in the research community. Qualitative coding of participant definitions showed that intelligence and knowledge are closely related, but asymmetrically-when defining what it means to be intelligent, participants reference knowledge, but intelligence is not considered in explaining knowing. Although participants note that intelligence is multi-faceted and related to problem-solving, there is an emphasis (in terms of frequency of mentions) on the crystallized side of intelligence (i.e., knowledge). A deeper understanding of lay participants' mental models of these constructs (i.e., their metacognitions) is essential for bridging gaps between experts and the general public.