The effect of expectation-experience congruency on the recognition and confidence judgment

Previous findings about whether expectation congruent or incongruent information has an advantage on recognition are not consistent. The main objective of the current thesis was to examine whether expectation-experience congruency has an impact on old/new judgments and confidence judgments in both short-delay and long-delay conditions. In the first session of the study, 60 participants (Mage = 26.18, SDage = 3.17) read an either positive, negative, or neutral restaurant scenario which induced expectations for later food stimuli. Then, they evaluated a total 60 food visuals on a Likert-scale ranging as 1 ("Disgusting") to 5("Very Tasty") in the encoding phase and asked to recognize them by making an old/new judgment after 10 minutes. They also evaluated their confidence about their answers with the rating chart from "0" to "100". One day later in the second session, 60 of the participants that took part in the first session (Mage = 26.42, SDage = 3.06) were asked to make another old/new and confidence judgment. The findings revealed that there was no significant effect of expectation-incongruency on the old/new recognition and confidence level in both sessions. However, there was a significant main effect of the visual types on hit rates in both the short-delay and long-delay condition. Tasty and disgusting visuals were recognized better than neutral food visuals in short-delay condition and tasty food visuals were recognized better than neutral food visuals in long-delay. Results on the confidence judgments showed that tasty food visuals were remembered with a higher confidence judgment compared to other visuals.