Gerontologists have increasingly turned to examination of ecological aspects of memory, including study of memory in naturalistic settings. This research explores relationships between metamemory, defined as cognitions about one's own memory functions, and the relationship of such cognititons to actual memory performance in older adults. The proposed research examines metamemory and metamemory/memory performance relationships while (1) carefully differentiating knowledge about memory functions from beliefs of personal self- efficacy and (2) using multiple types of memory performance. In the last funding cycle, we examined metamemory relationships with text recall and free recall of a categorized word list. In this cycle we continue that approach while adding a new memory task more closely linked to everyday cognition: recognition memory for diary recorded daily life events. Another major feature of the proposed research is the collection of a short-term (two-year) longitudinal retest of individual who have previously participated in a cross-sectional study. The original study was designed to provide data on the convergent/discriminant validity of metamemory, memory performance, and related variables, including psychometric personality, general self-efficacy beliefs, affective states, and psychological well-being. The longitudinal retest will enable us to examine the both 1) short-term stability of levels of metamemory and memory performance and 2) the stability of individual differences in these constructs over a wide age range. The study also continues our work on within-person (intraindividual) fluctuation in metamemory, memory performance, and related psychological variables. Together, the short-term longitudinal retest and the intraindividual panel data will help determine the degree to which temporal lability in affective states covary with lability in memory self-efficacy beliefs and memory performance. An additional contribution of this research is the generation of 25 structurally equivalent texts for use in text comprehension and recall studies. These texts have already been constructed; the proposed research will test empirically whether they are equivalent, as judged both text recall performance and subjective estimates of similarity on multiple dimensions (e.g., concreteness).
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