CCN Colloquium: "Social Metamemory: An Emerging Topic of Inquiry"

Psychology and Law research has established that mock jurors sometimes evaluate the accuracy of eyewitnesses using a host of inappropriate factors (e.g., attractiveness). Regardless, evaluators of others' memorial claims usually perform well above chance, and the core mechanisms supporting this social metamemory capacity are largely unknown. I will discuss our initial efforts at uncovering the processes and individual differences that contribute to the ability of witnesses to effectively communicate the veracity of their memories recount their memorial experiences through natural language, and the ability of evaluators to effectively decode this information. In doing so, I will also show how we have used simple machine learners to provide an objective metric of the likely accuracy of witnesses' verbal justifications of their memory conclusions.