Subjective experience as a basis for "objective" judgments: Effects of past experience on judgments of difficulty

Studies of metacognition are studies of subjective experience and the utility of subjective experience for the control of behavior. Assessments of the objective difficulty of problems or the comprehensibility of text are often based on one's subjective experience with the problems or text. However, subjective experience can be altered by specific prior experiences. A series of experiments explored the effect of reading or paraphrasing sentences on later estimates of the reading level of those and new sentences. Participants interpreted the increased familiarity of previously experienced sentences as due to the qualities of the sentences themselves and rated old sentences as less difficult than new sentences. This "illusion of simplicity" was eliminated when participants who had read the sentences twice in the first phase were required to engage in new analyses prior to rating them in the second phase.