Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning facts without first considering what they could be can lead to hindsight bias. How might this impact (a)memory and (b) understanding of novel topics? Foresight participants read about five psychology studies, including meanperformance of one group; then they estimated the mean performance of another group and stated causes for the difference;finally, they received the second group’s actual performance. Hindsight participants learned about both groups’ performance atthe beginning, then imagined what estimates and causes they would have indicated had they not seen actual means. A weeklater, half of each group recalled the means they had learned, and other half estimated means for a novel set of studies. Weconsidered the extent to which: 1. foresight promotes long-term memories as opposed to providing an anchor that biasesmemories; 2. foresight cultivates a habit of considering alternative possible outcomes that might help one understand noveltopics.