Errors committed with high confidence are hypercorrected

The relation between people's confidence in the accuracy of an erroneous re sponse and their later performance was investigated. Most models of human m emory suggest that the higher a person's confidence, the stronger the item (in the context of the eliciting cue) that is retrieved from memory. In rec all, stronger associates to a cue interfere with competing associates more than do weaker associates. This state of affairs implies that errors endors ed with high, rather than low, confidence should be more difficult to corre ct by learning the correct response feedback. In contrast to the authors' e xpectations, highly confident errors were the most likely to be corrected i n a subsequent retest. Participants nearly always endorsed the correct resp onse in cases in which both the correct response and the original erroneous response were generated at retest, suggesting that people possess a refine d metacognitive ability to know what is correct and incorrect.