Metacognition and memory for nonoccurrence

A familiar hypothesis about the recognition of distracter items as "new" is that it depends heavily on a metacognitive strategy in which the memorabil ity or salience of the distracter is evaluated: if the item was deemed sali ent or memorable and yet no memory trace for it can be found, then it must not have been studied (e.g. Strack & Bless, 1994). In four experiments, no evidence was found to support this metamemory hypothesis. Experiments 1a, 1 b, and 2 demonstrated that the judged salience of the stimuli did not predi ct participants' recognition judgements for distracters. In Experiments 3a and 3b, instructional manipulations designed to affect the ostensible metac ognitive process failed to affect the recognition judgements. Finally, Expe riment 4 indicated that confidence judgements do not support the prediction s of the metamemory hypothesis.