ABSTRACT
Metamemory illusions may be defined as cases in which people’s judgments about their own memories seriously deviate from the actual states of their memories. It has been proposed that several metamemory illusions are due to basing metamemory judgments on the ease or fluency of processing information during learning and retrieval. This chapter reviews state-of-the-art knowledge about the contribution of fluency to prominent metamemory illusions such as the font size illusion, the stability bias, and the underconfidence-with-practice effect. It is concluded that fluency drives some but not all metamemory illusions. Implications for the basis of metamemory and exciting directions for future research are discussed.
