Explaining individual differences in cognitive processes underlying hindsight bias

After learning an event's outcome, people's recollection of their former prediction of that event typically shifts toward the actual outcome. Erdfelder and Buchner (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 387-414, 1998) developed a multinomial processing tree (MPT) model to identify the underlying processes contributing to this hindsight bias (HB) phenomenon. More recent applications of this model have revealed that, in comparison to younger adults, older adults are more susceptible to two underlying HB processes: recollection bias and reconstruction bias. However, the impact of cognitive functioning on these processes remains unclear. In this article, we extend the MPT model for HB by incorporating individual variation in cognitive functioning into the estimation of the model's core parameters in older and younger adults. In older adults, our findings revealed that (1) better episodic memory was associated with higher recollection ability in the absence of outcome knowledge, (2) better episodic memory and inhibitory control and higher working memory capacity were associated with higher recollection ability in the presence of outcome knowledge, and (3) better inhibitory control was associated with less reconstruction bias. Although the pattern of effects was similar in younger adults, the cognitive covariates did not significantly predict the underlying HB processes in this age group. In sum, we present a novel approach to modeling individual variability in MPT models. We applied this approach to the HB paradigm to identify the cognitive mechanisms contributing to the underlying HB processes. Our results show that working memory capacity and inhibitory control, respectively, drive individual differences in recollection bias and reconstruction bias, particularly in older adults.