Accounts of the confidence-accuracy relation in recognition memory

Confidence and accuracy, while often considered to tap the same memory repr esentation, are often found to be only weakly correlated (e.g., Bothwell, D effenbacher, & Brigham, 1987; Deffenbacher, 1980). There are at least two p ossible (nonexclusive) reasons for this weak relation. First, it may be sim ply due to noise of one sort or another; that is, it may come about because of both within- and between-subjects statistical variations that are parti ally uncorrelated for confidence measures on the one hand and accuracy meas ures on the other. Second, confidence and accuracy may be uncorrelated beca use they are based, at least in part, on different memory representations t hat are affected in different ways by different independent variables. We p ropose a general theory that is designed to encompass bell of these possibi lities and, within the context of this theory, we evaluate effects of four variables-degree of rehearsal, study duration, study luminance, and test lu minance-in three face recognition experiments. In conjunction with our theo ry, the results allow us to begin to identify the circumstances under which confidence and accuracy are based on the same versus different sources of information in memory. The results demonstrate the conditions under which s ubjects are quite poor at monitoring their memory performance, and are used to extend cue utilization theories to the domain of face recognition.