Exploring the Relationship between Working Memory, Metamemory and Fluid Intelligence: A Correlational Study

Event: Undergraduate Research Symposium
Date: May 18, 2019
Location: UCI Student Center

Presenters: Katerina Christhilf, Rachel Smith
Mentors: Susanna Jaeggi, Grace Lin, Austin Moon

Title: Exploring the Relationship between Working Memory, Metamemory and Fluid Intelligence: A Correlational Study

Abstract

​In life, people continually have to make judgments about their own memory capacities to determine what they will or will not remember. People’s awareness of their own memory capacity is known as metamemory. Previous research has confirmed a positive correlation between working memory and fluid intelligence, but few studies have examined how metamemory correlates with these two cognitive functions. We hypothesize that working memory, fluid intelligence, and metamemory are all positively correlated with each other. Undergraduate students completed three cognitive tasks in one of six order conditions. The working memory task required participants to remember up to three numbers back in a series of moving numbers. Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices was used as a measure of fluid intelligence. We used a metamemory task that asks participants to bet on how likely they think they will remember each word in a list, then freely recall the words. Preliminary analyses from 50 participants suggest that working memory and fluid intelligence are correlated positively to each other, but not to metamemory, indicating our memory judgments may be independent of our other cognitive skills.

Katerina Christhilf & Rachel Smith at 2019 UROP Symposium