Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Monitoring External Memory, Paula T. Hertel

Psychology Faculty Research

The proposal that guides this research is that organizational structures of external memories, like those of internal memories, play an important role in monitoring knowledge. Previous evidence for such a relation was obtained in a laboratory experiment. Here, I report the results of a survey of faculty at Trinity University. They judged their confidence in knowledge related to their research and described their external memories (office files and bookshelves). The more confident among them had read and stored more information; they also maintained the more organized offices. In multiple-regression analyses, organization was the best predictor of confidence.