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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Do People Back-Project Rules?

Henrike Flimm¹, Matan Mazor², Chris Donkin¹; ¹Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, ²University of Oxford

Presenter: Henrike Flimm

Inferring that something is new requires confidence that one would know if it were old. We provide initial evidence suggesting that people often lack this confidence: participants back-projected a simple regularity that appeared in the second half of a multi-armed bandit task, i.e., they seemed to believe that the regularity had been present long before they detected it despite no evidence for its presence. This effect appears inconsistent with people's tendency to overestimate their ability to detect observable changes and reflects a dissociation between learning and behaviour. In future work, we will explore the generality of back-projection across paradigms. Keywords: metacognition; change detection; structure learning; self-model; memory

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures