Memory and metamemory for actions in children with autism: Exploring global metacognitive judgements.

BACKGROUND: Standards in education emphasize the role of metacognition in successful academic outcomes for those with and without learning challenges. Research into metamemory in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has produced mixed outcomes, with some studies finding children with ASD to have spared metacognitive accuracy and others finding it impaired. While most research has used item-by-item metamemory judgements, the novelty of the current study was to use global judgments-of-learning (global JOLs). METHOD: Twenty-three children with and twenty without ASD were presented with two lists of action words during a learning phase and were asked to either act out the words in a self-performed task or just listen to them being read aloud in a verbal task (control condition). Typically, self-performance produces memory benefits called the enactment effect. For both tasks, children also made pre-learning and post-learning global JOLs, stating how many words they thought they would recall. RESULTS: Both groups demonstrated the enactment effect, but neither predicted its beneficial effect. Compared to controls, participants with ASD were found to be less accurate in predicting their future memory performance, specifically in the self-performed task. Both groups were comparable in terms of metacognitive monitoring. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the findings suggest that success or failure in metacognitive tasks in ASD might depend on task difficulty, and the type of metacognitive judgement used.

The Proust Machine: What a Public Science Event Tells Us About Autobiographical Memory and the Five Senses.

Our senses are constantly stimulated in our daily lives but we have only a limited understanding of how they affect our cognitive processes and, especially, our autobiographical memory. Capitalizing on a public science event, we conducted the first empirical study that aimed to compare the relative influence of the five senses on the access, temporal distribution, and phenomenological characteristics of autobiographical memories in a sample of about 400 participants. We found that the access and the phenomenological features of memories varied as a function of the type of sensory cues, but not their temporal distribution. With regard to their influence on autobiographical memory, an overlap between some senses was found, with on one hand, olfaction and taste and, on the other, vision, audition, and touch. We discuss these findings in the light of theories of perception, memory, and the self, and consider methodological implications of the sensory cuing technique in memory research, as well as clinical implications for research in psychopathological and neuropsychological populations.

Prospective Memory Predictions in Aging: Increased Overconfidence in Older Adults.

INTRODUCTION: This study investigated whether young and older adults can predict their future performance on an event-based prospective memory (PM) task. METHODS: Metacognitive awareness was assessed by asking participants to give judgments-of-learning (JOLs) on an item-level for the prospective (remembering that something has to be done) and retrospective (remembering what to do) PM component. In addition, to explore possible age differences in the ability to adapt predictions to the difficulty of the task, encoding time and the relatedness between the prospective and the retrospective PM component were varied. RESULTS: Results revealed that both age groups were sensitive to our task manipulations and adapted their predictions appropriately. Moreover, item-level JOLs indicated that for the retrospective component, young and older adults were equally accurate and slightly overconfident. For the prospective component, predictions were fairly accurate in young adults, while older adults were overconfident. Thus, results suggest that general overconfidence is increased in older adults and concerns both components of PM. DISCUSSION: Findings regarding the conceptual differences between the prospective and retrospective components of a PM task, as well as the link between aging and metamemory in PM are discussed.

How accurate are runners' prospective predictions of their race times?

Metacognition is a domain which has illuminated our understanding of the regulation of cognition, but has yet to be applied in detail to more physical activities. We used half marathon finish time predictions from 7211 runners to investigate the factors that influence running performance metacognitive accuracy. In particular, we were concerned with the effects of experience, gender, and age on calibration. We expected more experienced runners to be better calibrated than less experienced ones. Given analogous findings in the domain of metacognition, we expected women to be less overconfident in their predictions, and better calibrated than male runners. Based on the metacognition literature, we expected that if older runners have effectively learned from previous experience, they would be as well-calibrated as younger runners. In contrast, uninformed inferences not based on performance feedback would lead to overestimating performance for older compared to younger runners. As expected, experience in terms of both club membership and previous race completion improved calibration. Unexpectedly though, females were more overconfident than males, overestimating their performance and demonstrating poorer calibration. A positive relationship was observed between age and prediction accuracy, with older runners showing better calibration. The present study demonstrates that data, collected before a test of physical activity, can inform our understanding of how participants anticipate their performance, and how this ability is affected by a number of demographic and situational variables. Athletes and coaches alike should be aware of these variables to better understand, organise, plan, and predict running performance, potentially leading to more appropriate training sessions and faster race finish times.

The Cognitive Effects of Wearable Cameras in Mild Alzheimer Disease - An Experimental Study.

BACKGROUND: Wearable cameras are a new type of intervention aimed at stimulating memory in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Such passive external memory aids have started to be considered as alternatives to both more active external aids (such as writing in diaries, journals, and timetables) and to internal cognitive strategies (such as spaced retrieval, errorless learning). OBJECTIVE: In order to understand the benefits of these innovative devices for memory compensation, the present experiment examined the effectiveness of two memory training strategies: SenseCam, a wearable camera, a passive external memory aid and a memory training programme (MEMO+) created from tasks known to stimulate memory, in comparison with a control condition, a personal written diary. METHOD: Fifty-one patients with mild AD were randomly assigned to one of these three groups. Training lasted for six consecutive weeks, two sessions a week, one hour each, for all groups. Patients underwent a neuropsychological assessment at baseline, after treatment and at follow up (six months later). RESULTS: Groups showed non-significant differences at baseline. After treatment and at follow up, the SenseCam group had a superior autobiographical memory (AM) performance, compared to the Memo+ and Diary groups. The SenseCam and the Memo+ groups both showed improved episodic and semantic memory, and somewhat improved executive function. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that passive memory training with SenseCam is a promising alternative to traditional memory training programs to help AD patients with autobiographical memory performance.

Hippocampus duality: Memory and novelty detection are subserved by distinct mechanisms.

The hippocampus plays a pivotal role both in novelty detection and in long-term memory. The physiological mechanisms underlying these behaviors have yet to be understood in humans. We recorded intracerebral evoked potentials within the hippocampus of epileptic patients (n = 10) during both memory and novelty detection tasks (targets in oddball tasks). We found that memory and detection tasks elicited late local field potentials in the hippocampus during the same period, but of opposite polarity (negative during novelty detection tasks, positive during memory tasks, ∼260-600 ms poststimulus onset, P < 0.05). Critically, these potentials had maximal amplitude on the same contact in the hippocampus for each patient. This pattern did not depend on the task as different types of memory and novelty detection tasks were used. It did not depend on the novelty of the stimulus or the difficulty of the task either. Two different hypotheses are discussed to account for this result: it is either due to the activation of CA1 pyramidal neurons by two different pathways such as the monosynaptic and trisynaptic entorhinal-hippocampus pathways, or to the activation of different neuronal populations, that is, differing either functionally (e.g., novelty/familiarity neurons) or located in different regions of the hippocampus (e.g., CA1/subiculum). In either case, these activities may integrate the activity of two distinct large-scale networks implementing externally or internally oriented, mutually exclusive, brain states. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Evaluating the subject-performed task effect in healthy older adults: relationship with neuropsychological tests.

BACKGROUND: An enhancement in recall of simple instructions is found when actions are performed in comparison to when they are verbally presented - the subject-performed task (SPT) effect. This enhancement has also been found with older adults. However, the reason why older adults, known to present a deficit in episodic memory, have a better performance for this type of information remains unclear. In this article, we explored this effect by comparing the performance on the SPT task with the performance on other tasks, in order to understand the underlying mechanisms that may explain this effect. OBJECTIVE: We hypothesized that both young and older adult groups should show higher recall in SPT compared with the verbal learning condition, and that the differences between age groups should be lower in the SPT condition. We aimed to explore the correlations between these tasks and known neuropsychological tests, and we also measured source memory for the encoding condition. DESIGN: A mixed design was used with 30 healthy older adults, comparing their performance with 30 healthy younger adults. Each participant was asked to perform 16 simple instructions (SPT condition) and to only read the other 16 instructions (Verbal condition - VT). The test phase included a free recall task. Participants were also tested with a set of neuropsychological measures (speed of processing, working memory and verbal episodic memory). RESULTS: The SPT effect was found for both age groups; but even for SPT materials, group differences in recall persisted. Source memory was found to be preserved for the two groups. Simple correlations suggested differences in correlates of SPT performance between the two groups. However, when controlling for age, the SPT and VT tasks correlate with each other, and a measure of episodic memory correlated moderately with both SPT and VT performance. CONCLUSIONS: A strong effect of SPT was observed for all but one, which still displayed the expected aging deficit. The correlations and source memory data suggest that the SPT and VT are possibly related in respect to their underlying processes, and SPT, instead of being an isolated process, is in connection with both the episodic memory and executive function processes. Under these circumstances, the SPT seems to contribute to an enhancement of the episodic memory trace, presumably from the multimodality it provides, without involving a separated set of cognitive mechanisms. Future research using more pure measures of other cognitive processes that could be related to SPT is necessary.

Implausible future events in a confabulating patient with an anterior communicating artery aneurysm.

Patient MW, a known confabulator, and healthy age-matched controls produced past and future events. Events were judged on emotional valence and plausibility characteristics. No differences in valence were found between MW and controls, although a positive emotional bias toward the future was observed. Strikingly, MW produced confabulations about future events that were significantly more implausible than those produced by healthy controls whereas MW and healthy controls produced past events comparable in plausibility. A neurocognitive explanation is offered based on differences between remembering and imagining. Possible implications of this single case in relation to confabulation and mental time travel are discussed.

Metamemory and prospective memory in Parkinson's disease.

OBJECTIVE: Metamemory is integral for strategizing about memory intentions. This study investigated the prospective memory (PM) deficit in Parkinson's disease (PD) from a metamemory viewpoint, with the aim of examining whether metamemory deficits might contribute to PM deficits in PD. METHOD: Sixteen patients with PD and 16 healthy older adult controls completed a time-based PM task (initiating a key press at two specified times during an ongoing task), and an event-based PM task (initiating a key press in response to animal words during an ongoing task). To measure metamemory participants were asked to predict and postdict their memory performance before and after completing the tasks, as well as complete a self-report questionnaire regarding their everyday memory function. RESULTS: The PD group had no impairment, relative to controls, on the event-based task, but had prospective (initiating the key press) and retrospective (recalling the instructions) impairments on the time-based task. The PD group also had metamemory impairments on the time-based task; they were inaccurate at predicting their performance before doing the task but, became accurate when making postdictions. This suggests impaired metamemory knowledge but preserved metamemory monitoring. There were no group differences regarding PD patients' self-reported PM performance on the questionnaire. CONCLUSIONS: These results reinforce previous findings that PM impairments in PD are dependent on task type. Several accounts of PM failures in time-based tasks are presented, in particular, ways in which mnemonic and metacognitive deficits may contribute to the difficulties observed on the time-based task.

The self and dreams during a period of transition.

The content of dreams and changes to the self were investigated in students moving to University. In study 1, 20 participants completed dream diaries and memory tasks before and after they had left home and moved to university, and generated self images, "I am..." statements (e.g. I am an undergraduate), reflective of their current self. Changes in "I ams" were observed, indicating a newly-formed 'university' self. These self, images and related autobiographical knowledge were found to be incorporated into recent dreams but not into dreams from other periods. Study 2 replicated these findings in a different sample (N=55). We suggest that these data reflect a period of self-consolidation in which new experiences and self images are incorporated into autobiographical memory knowledge structures representing personal goals during sleep.

The persistence of erroneous familiarity in an epileptic male: challenging perceptual theories of déjà vu activation.

We report the case of a 39-year-old, temporal lobe epileptic male, MH. Prior to complex partial seizure, experienced up to three times a day, MH often experiences an aura experienced as a persistent sensation of déjà vu. Data-driven theories of déjà vu formation suggest that partial familiarity for the perceived stimulus is responsible for the sensation. Consequently, diverting attention away from this stimulus should cause the sensation to dissipate. MH, whose sensations of déjà vu persist long enough for him to shift his perceptual focus a number of times during the experience, spontaneously reports that these shifts make no difference to the sensation experienced. This novel observation challenges data-driven theories of déjà vu formation which have been used to explain the occurrence of déjà vu in those with temporal lobe epilepsy and the general population. Clearly, in epilepsy, erratic neuronal firing is the likely contributor, and in this paper we postulate that such brain firing causes higher-order erroneous 'cognitive feelings'. We tentatively extend this account to the general population. Rather than being a reaction to familiar elements in perceptual stimuli, déjà vu is likely to be the result of a cognitive feeling borne of the erroneous activation of neural familiarity circuits such as the parahippocampal gyrus, persisting as long as this activation persists.

Normal patterns of déjà experience in a healthy, blind male: challenging optical pathway delay theory.

We report the case of a 25-year-old healthy, blind male, MT, who experiences normal patterns of déjà vu. The optical pathway delay theory of déjà vu formation assumes that neuronal input from the optical pathways is necessary for the formation of the experience. Surprisingly, although the sensation of déjà vu is known to be experienced by blind individuals, we believe this to be the first reported application of this knowledge to the understanding of the phenomenon. Visual input is not present in MT, yet the experiences he describes are consistent with reports in the literature of déjà vu occurrence in sighted people. The fact that blind people can experience déjà vu challenges the optical pathway delay theory, and alternative causes are briefly discussed.

Disordered memory awareness: recollective confabulation in two cases of persistent déjà vecu.

We describe two cases of false recognition in patients with dementia and diffuse temporal lobe pathology who report their memory difficulty as being one of persistent déjà vecu--the sensation that they have lived through the present moment before. On a number of recognition tasks, the patients were found to have high levels of false positives. They also made a large number of guess responses but otherwise appeared metacognitively intact. Informal reports suggested that the episodes of déjà vecu were characterised by sensations similar to those present when the past is recollectively experienced in normal remembering. Two further experiments found that both patients had high levels of recollective experience for items they falsely recognized. Most strikingly, they were likely to recollectively experience incorrectly recognised low frequency words, suggesting that their false recognition was not driven by familiarity processes or vague sensations of having encountered events and stimuli before. Importantly, both patients made reasonable justifications for their false recognitions both in the experiments and in their everyday lives and these we term 'recollective confabulation'. Thus, the patients are characterised by false recognition, overextended recollective experience, and recollective confabulation. These features are accounted for in terms of disrupted control of memory awareness and recollective states, possibly following brain damage to fronto-temporal circuits and we extend this account to normally and abnormally occurring states of déjà vu and vecu and related memory experiences.

Deficient acquisition and consolidation: intertrial free recall performance in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment.

Abstract Previous research demonstrates that dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) is characterised by deficits of episodic memory, especially in the acquisition of new material. As well as this deficit in acquisition, some researchers have also argued for a deficit in consolidation in DAT. We examined acquisition and consolidation by measuring the intertrial gained and lost access in DAT, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and controls. We report findings from a study of clinical data based on assessment of patients using three free recall trials of a word list. We found that both DAT and MCI groups showed a deficit in acquisition and consolidation of items between trials relative to controls. Moreover, the DAT group was significantly impaired relative to the MCI group for both acquisition and consolidation. Correlations within each group showed that there were strong relationships between intertrial measures and standard measures of memory function. Importantly in no group was there a significant correlation between our measures of acquisition and consolidation: we argue that these measures reflect different underlying processes, and the failure to consolidate in DATand MCI is not related to the deficit in acquisition. Finally, we showed strong correlations between our measure and dementia severity, suggesting that acquisition and consolidation both get worse as the dementia progresses.

Assessing the inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting with implicit-memory tests.

Five experiments examined whether retrieval-induced-forgetting effects are observed for implicit tests of memory. In each experiment participants first studied category-exemplar paired associates, then practiced retrieval for a subset of items from a subset of categories before finally completing memory tests for all the studied items. In standard fashion, inhibition was measured as the performance difference of unpracticed items from practiced categories and unpracticed items from unpracticed categories. Across the 5 experiments poorer performance for unpracticed items was seen in conceptual implicit memory (category generation and category matching) but not in perceptual implicit memory (stem completion, perceptual identification). Thus, retrieval-induced-forgetting effects are limited to tests of conceptual memory.