After a to-be-remembered event occurs, individuals may receive additional information that alters their memory for that event. When this external information is misleading, it can result in memory “contamination.” When this external information is accurate, individuals can benefit (e.g., seeing a hint at retrieval). Notably, it appears that even if this external information is only sometimes accurate, individuals can still benefit if they restrict use of that information to conditions where their own memory is particularly poor. This is known as low-confidence outsourcing. Existing work supporting this account has provided participants with unavoidable recognition cues that mark test items as “likely old” or “likely new”. However, this makes it difficult to see how individuals choose to use those cues. The present work gives participants the opportunity to seek out or avoid external cues, which allows for a higher resolution look at when and how individuals integrate external information into the recognition decision. In two single-item recognition studies we demonstrate that individuals improved recognition performance when they had the opportunity to seek out valid external cues. However, they only used those cues on about a quarter of trials where cues were available, and tended to use those cues most often when memory quality was poor. When individuals did acquire this information, they were heavily influenced by it. These results support accounts of low-confidence outsourcing.

发生要记住的事件后，个人可能会收到其他信息，这些信息会更改他们对该事件的记忆。如果此外部信息具有误导性，则可能导致内存“污染”。当此外部信息准确无误时，个人可以受益（例如，看到检索提示）。值得注意的是，即使此外部信息有时仅是准确的，但如果将这些信息的使用限制在自己的记忆力特别差的条件下，个人仍然可以从中受益。这就是所谓的低信任度外包。支持该帐户的现有工作已为参与者提供了不可避免的识别线索，这些线索将测试项目标记为“可能是旧的”或“可能是新的”。但是，这使得很难看到个人如何选择使用这些提示。当前的工作为参与者提供了寻找或避免外部线索的机会，从而可以更高分辨率地查看个人何时以及如何将外部信息整合到识别决策中。在两项单项识别研究中，我们证明了当个体有机会寻找有效的外部线索时，他们可以提高识别性能。但是，他们仅在可用线索的大约四分之一的试验中使用了这些线索，并且在内存质量较差的情况下，往往最常使用这些线索。当个人确实获得了这些信息时，他们深受它的影响。这些结果证明了低信任度外包的原因。