Mild cognitive impairment and feeling-of-knowing in episodic memory

Abstract

This study examined both retrospective and prospective memory self-monitoring abilities in 33 individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 33 healthy older adult controls. Participants learned 36 critical cue–target word pairs. Following a distractor task, participants were asked to recall each target word that corresponded to a given cue word. Confidence ratings were provided for recalled words. For nonrecalled words, feeling-of-knowing judgments about the likelihood of recognizing the target word on a subsequent recognition test were provided. We found that despite poorer episodic memory performance, the MCI individuals demonstrated accurate retrospective self-monitoring of recalled episodic material. In contrast, the MCI participants were less accurate than controls prospectively self-monitoring their memory for newly learned information. These findings suggest that memory self-monitoring is not a unitary construct and that amnestic MCI participants have difficulty with prospective memory self-monitoring abilities.

Keywords:

• Mild cognitive impairment
• Metamemory
• Memory monitoring
• Memory
• Feeling-of-knowing
• Memory self-monitoring

We thank Scott Creamer, Michelle Langill, Kimberly Lanni, and Alicia Rueda for their help in coordinating and collecting the data. We also thank the members of the Aging and Dementia Research Team for their help in collecting and scoring the data. Portions of this research were presented at the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society, Portland, Oregon, USA. This research was funded in part by an Edward R. Meyer Project Award. No financial or other relationships exist that could be interpreted as a conflict of interest pertaining to this manuscript.

Notes

¹No significant correlations emerged between scores on the GDS and metamemory accuracy for the MCI group (rs = –.14 to .27).