Within-person adaptivity in frugal judgments from memory

Humans can exploit recognition memory as a simple cue for judgment. The utility of recognition depends on the interplay with the environment, particularly on its predictive power (validity) in a domain. It is, therefore, an important question whether people are sensitive to differences in recognition validity between domains. Strategic, intra-individual changes in the reliance on recognition have not been investigated so far. The present study fills this gap by scrutinizing within-person changes in using a frugal strategy, the recognition heuristic (RH), across two task domains that differed in recognition validity. The results showed adaptive changes in the reliance on recognition between domains. However, these changes were neither associated with the individual recognition validities nor with corresponding changes in these validities. These findings support a domain-adaptivity explanation, suggesting that people have broader intuitions about the usefulness of recognition across different domains that are nonetheless sufficiently robust for adaptive decision making. The analysis of metacognitive confidence reports mirrored and extended these results. Like RH use, confidence ratings covaried with task domain, but not with individual recognition validities. The changes in confidence suggest that people may have metacognitive access to information about global differences between task domains, but not to individual cue validities.