Memory accessibility as a cue for perceived importance.

Abstract

People frequently rely on subjective assessments of importance to navigate daily decisions, yet the psychological underpinnings of these judgments are not fully understood. Crucially, non-diagnostic factors, such as memory accessibility, may skew these evaluations. The present study examined the interplay between memory outcomes and judgments of importance. Participants engaged in a memory test involving 20 scientific theories, followed by assessments of each theory's importance. Results revealed a bias whereby successfully recalled theories were deemed more important than those not recalled. Additionally, even in the case of retrieval failure, metacognitive feelings of knowing positively correlated with importance judgments. Finally, when memory was tested via recognition, which lowers retrieval difficulty, this importance bias was diminished, indicating that the effort or challenge of retrieval may be used as a cue for importance. Across these experiments, a consistent pattern emerged (recalled information was considered more important than forgotten information) that aligns with the hypothesis that memory accessibility and subjective judgments of importance are intertwined. Thus, people may deem things they remember as having higher importance and things they forget as having less importance, based in part on the degree of memory accessibility which is not necessarily a valid indicator of the true status of that information's value.