Prospective and retrospective episodic metamemory in posttraumatic stress disorder

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been consistently associated with episodic memory deficits. To some extent, these deficits could be related to an impairment of metamemory in individuals with PTSD. This research consequently aims at investigating prospective (feeling-of-knowing, FOK) and retrospective (confidence) metamemory judgments for episodic information in PTSD.

Method: Twenty participants with PTSD and without depression were compared to 30 healthy comparison participants on metamemory judgments during an episodic memory task. The concordance between metamemory judgments and recognition performance was then assessed by gamma correlations.

Results: The results confirmed that PTSD is associated with episodic memory impairment. Regarding metamemory, gamma correlations indicated that participants with PTSD failed to accurately predict their future memory performance as compared to the comparison group (mean FOK gamma correlations: .23 vs. .42, respectively). Furthermore, participants with PTSD made less accurate confidence judgments than comparison participants (mean confidence gamma correlations: .62 vs. .74, respectively).

Conclusion: Our results demonstrate an alteration of both prospective and retrospective metamemory processes in PTSD, which could be of particular relevance to future therapeutic interventions focusing on metacognitive strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Confidence judgment
• episodic memory
• feeling-of-knowing
• metamemory
• posttraumatic stress disorder
• PTSD

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Sarah L. Garcia for English editing of this manuscript and the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) International Liaison Committee (ILS) Research Editing and Consulting Program for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.