Several questionnaires concerning metamemory have been widely used within psychological research with various participant populations in order to examine the structure and function of metamemory within everyday life. This study investigates the characteristics of metamemory in older adults and memory aging using three typical metamemory questionnaires. The Everyday Memory Questionnaire (EMQ: 28 items), the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ: 25 items), and the Memory Ability Questionnaire (MAQ: 31 items) were administered to 344 older adults (60–88 years) attending a senior citizen education program. Comparisons with normative data for a large sample of younger adults (809 undergraduate students)obtained in a prior study, employing a similar method, revealed that the older participants (n=334) have higher self-assessments for their own memory functions for almost all aspects of everyday memory apart from memory for personal names. The results are mainly discussed in terms of the differences in memory loads for younger and older adults within everyday life.

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The present study investigated the influences of experienced outcome density on the P(R) (probability of responding) effect in active contingency tasks. The P(R) effect was explained by assuming that the coincidental experiences of active responses and uncontrollable outcomes would increase the participants' cognitive contingency of the response and uncontrollable outcome. The P(R) effect has been demonstrated by only one other study so far, involving only one value of outcome density that participants experienced in the learning phase. Accordingly, the present study reexamined the P(R) effect by using three values of outcome density: 76%, 24% (Experiment 1), and 10% (Experiment 2). The results showed that the P(R) effect increased in the 76% outcome-density condition, but did not in the other conditions. The results imply that the P(R) effect would increase only when one experiences the high outcome density.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of working memory capacity (WMC) on the process and performance of rule induction. More specifically, the study tests the following three hypotheses. Based on prior studies, (1) performance for rule discovery is higher in high-WMC individuals than in low-WMC individuals. The other two hypotheses draw on the perspectives that WMC reflects both a temporary storage capacity for information and controlled attention. (2) High-WMC individuals are able to more actively integrate instances than low-WMC individuals. (3) High-WMC individuals can sustain attention to a focal factor, although low-WMC individuals cannot because their attentions are interrupted by other factors. The results of our experiment employing eye tracking support the first and second hypotheses. However, the results do not support the third hypothesis. These results suggest that the relation between WMC and rule-induction performance does not depend on attention control, but rather on temporary storage capacity.

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When a system yields an unpredicted output, people usually seek to identify the causes of the unexpected event. In this study, we investigate the effects of age and collaboration within elderly people on identifying the causes of unexpected events using the Three-card Monte card trick. The results of the experiments showed that performance for cause identification was lower in elderly participants compared to younger participants. Although there were no substantial differences in the reasoning strategies employed by younger and elderly participants, elderly participants experienced difficulties in distinguishing between trick-dependent and nondependent aspects. Collaboration between elderly participants facilitated cause-identification performance. However, while pairs of elderly participants were more suspicious of events involving tricks, they also remained suspicious of events that did not involve tricks.

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Although most prior studies have assumed that the anchoring effect is produced by numerical processes, the semantic model proposed by Mussweiler and Strack (1999a) assumes that anchoring effects reflect specific pieces of knowledge activated by an anchor. To test the model, Sugimoto and Takano (2011) examined the mechanisms underlying the anchoring effect when participants have little knowledge about the inference target. The results of their study suggested that, when semantic anchoring efforts cannot occur, anchoring effects are produced by numerical processes. The present study reexamines this cover effect. For this purpose, this study contain two experiment that adopt two target of inference, Cao Cao (Chinese historical character) & Kovar (alloy of iron and other metal). These two experiment could reassure “cover effect.”

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