Assessing prospective and retrospective metacognitive accuracy following traumatic brain injury remotely across cognitive domains

ABSTRACT

The ability to monitor one's behaviour is frequently impaired following TBI, impacting on patients’ rehabilitation. Inaccuracies in judgement or self-reflection of one’s performance provides a useful marker of metacognition. However, metacognition is rarely measured during routine neuropsychology assessments and how it varies across cognitive domains is unclear. A cohort of participants consisting of 111 TBI patients [mean age = 45.32(14.15), female = 29] and 84 controls [mean age = 31.51(12.27), female = 43] was studied. Participants completed cognitive assessments via a bespoke digital platform on their smartphones. Included in the assessment were a prospective evaluation of memory and attention, and retrospective confidence judgements of task performance. Metacognitive accuracy was calculated from the difference between confidence judgement of task performance and actual performance. Prospective judgment of attention and memory was correlated with task performance in these domains for controls but not patients. TBI patients had lower task performance in processing speed, executive functioning and working memory compared to controls, maintaining high confidence, resulting in overestimation of cognitive performance compared to controls. Additional judgments of task performance complement neuropsychological assessments with little additional time–cost. These results have important theoretical and practical implications for evaluation of metacognitive impairment in TBI patients and neurorehabilitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Traumatic brain injury
• metacognition
• remote cognitive assessment
• self-awareness
• processing speed
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Author N.J.B. is funded by the Imperial presidents PhD scholarship. The development of the online testing platform was supported by NIHR i4i (invention for innovation) Track-Cog-TBI: Computer-based TRACKing and Training COGnition after traumatic brain injury (TBI) Award ID:II-LB-0715-20006.