Wednesday, May 21, 2025
5/21/2025
METAMEMORY DEFICITS IN PEOPLE WITH ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE - DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal is written in response to PAR 03-056 and focuses on research topic number 16 (Executive Function). Metamemory is traditionally defined as the knowledge and awareness we have about our own memory. Metamemory focuses on the interplay between monitoring our mental state and controlling our cognitive processes. Awareness of our memory capabilities allows us to implement strategies to better remember events. Metamemory failure in people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) can influence episodic memory through the failure to allocate resources during study or the failure to reject possible competitor items at test. To further investigate metamemory in people with AD, a judgment-of-learning (JOL) procedure is adopted in which participants are asked to judge how easy it will be to remember an item immediately after studying that item. Researchers have proposed that JOLs are influenced by three classes of cues: intrinsic, extrinsic, and mnemonic. Intrinsic factors include item properties; extrinsic factors pertain to the encoding operations applied by a learner; mnemonic factors include idiosyncratic knowledge about one's own memory. These factors will be examined in detail to determine what cues lead to the most accurate metamemory performance. Further, the proposed research examines whether the deficit in episodic memory JOLs is reliably related to impaired executive functions as assessed through psychometric measures that have been localized to frontal and medial temporal regions. Three experiments manipulate intrinsic, extrinsic, and mnemonic cues independently. Memory accuracy will be compared to JOLs using Goodman-Kruskal gamma (y) correlations and absolute calibration. Metamemory accuracy will be correlated to psychometric measures in order to assess the neurological underpinnings of metamemory deficits. Results from this research will foster the development of a larger federal grant proposal which will investigate how reliance on metamemory can be used to improve episodic memory in people with AD.
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