Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People tend to judge repeated information as more veridical, referred to as the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE). While recent findings show that the effect is still observed when we “know better”, how episodic experiences influence ITE and how metacognitive judgment (i.e. subjective confidence) of one’s response changes with repetition remains unclear. To address this question participants watched a video and then judged the truth value of statements about the video, presented in varied repetitions (0,1,4). We compared truth and confidence judgments of repeated items that were false, true, or unknowable. We found that for true statements repetition increased confidence and truth judgments. For false items, it increased only confidence leaving truth judgments unaffected. Conversely for unknowable items, repetition increased truth judgments but not confidence. These results suggest that based on information’s congruence with memory references, its repetition impacts truth and confidence judgments differentially.