The impact of metamemory and domain-specific knowledge on memory performance

This paper consists of two major parts. First, research exploring possible interactions between metamemory and domain-specific knowledge in influencing children’s text recall and comprehension is briefly summarized. Overall, the findings indicate that metacognitive knowledge does make a difference even in cases where domain-specific knowledge is rich. Second, a recent experiment conducted in our lab and investigating the generalizability of this conclusion for sort-recall tasks is described in more detail. Third — and fourth-grade soccer experts and novices were first given a comprehensive metamemory questionnaire and then administered a sort-recall tasks using two different picture lists: whereas one list included items from various semantical categories (e.g., animals, clothes), the other list was composed of soccer pictures that could be classified in several categories such as players, kicks, or equipment. The results showed that although domain-specific knowledge had a strong impact on recall of the soccer list, general metacognitive knowledge made an independent contribution, particularly for the group of soccer experts. More specifically, good metamemory positively affected the recall of experts but had no impact on novices’ memory performance.