What determines initial feeling of knowing? Familiarity with question terms, not with the answer.

Abstract

How do people know whether they have an answer to a question before they actually find it in their memory? We conducted 2 experiments exploring this question, in which Ss were trained on relatively novel 2-digit×2-digit arithmetic problems (e.g., 23×27). Before answering each problem, Ss made a quick feeling of knowing judgment as to whether they could directly retrieve the answer from memory or had to compute it