Comparing event-related potentials of retrospective and prospective metacognitive judgments during episodic and semantic memory (original) (raw)
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Neurobiological basis of feeling of knowing in episodic memory
Cognitive Neurodynamics, 2019
Feeling of knowing (FOK) is a metacognitive process which allows individuals to predict the likelihood that they will be able to remember, in the future, information which they currently cannot recall. Although FOK provides evidence for the mechanisms of metacognitive systems, the neurobiological basis of FOK is still unclear. We investigated the neural correlates of FOK induced by an episodic memory task in 77 younger adult participants. Data were gathered using eventrelated potentials (ERPs). ERP components during high, low, extremely high and extremely low FOK judgments were analyzed. Stimulus-locked ERP analyses indicated that FOK judgment was associated with greater positivity for P200 component at frontal, central, and parietal electrode zones and greater negativity for the N200 component at parietal electrode zones. Furthermore, results revealed that amplitude of the ERP components for FOK judgments were affected by the level of FOK judgment. Results suggest that ERP components of FOK judgment observed within a 200 ms time window support the perceptual fluency-based model.
Cue familiarity and ‘don’t know’responding in episodic memory tasks
Metacognitive monitoring and control are two interdependent mechanisms by which people regulate encoding and retrieval processes in memory. While much is known about monitoring, and how the results of monitoring processes affect control at encoding, much less evidence is available for the monitoring-control relationship with respect to the regulation of retrieval. The present study provides information on this point by assessing whether a factor that is known to affect metacognitive monitoring at retrieval, i.e. cue familiarity, affects also metacognitive control at retrieval (i.e. the decision to volunteer or withhold a response in a memory task). In seven experiments cue familiarity was manipulated by having participants make a pleasantness judgment beforehand for half of the critical cues. Results showed that cue familiarity affected not only metacognitive judgments of feeling-of-knowing and retrospective confidence, but also the rate of 'don't know' responses in different recognition tasks. These results demonstrate that a factor known to affect metacognitive monitoring determines also the decision to volunteer or withhold a response (metacognitive control), which in turn shapes participants' performance in a memory task.
Neural Correlates of Judgments of Learning - An ERP Study on Metacognition
Brain research, 2016
Metacognitive assessment of performance has been revealed to be one of the most powerful predictors of human learning success and academic achievement. Yet, little is known about the functional nature of cognitive processes supporting judgments of learning (JOLs). The present study investigated the neural underpinnings of JOLs, using event-related brain potentials. Participants were presented with picture pairs and instructed to learn these pairs. After each pair, participants received a task cue, which instructed them to make a JOL (the likelihood of remembering the target when only presented with the cue) or to make a control judgment. Results revealed that JOLs were accompanied by a positive slow wave over medial frontal areas and a bilateral negative slow wave over occipital areas between 350ms and 700ms following the task cue. The results are discussed with respect to recent accounts on the neural correlates of judgments of learning.
Psychophysiology, 1998
Episodic memory encoding and distinctiveness detection were examined using event-related potentials~ERP! in a single-trial word list learning paradigm with free recall following distraction. To manipulate distinctiveness, encoding of high-and very low-frequency words was contrasted. Amplitudes of the N400 and late positive component~LPC! were larger for low-than for high-frequency words, and ERPs were more positive for subsequently recalled than not recalled words. This subsequent memory effect was dissociated from the correlates of distinctiveness by polarity for the N400 and by time course for the LPC and dissociable into two effects. The data suggest that the first subsequent memory effect, which occurred for both word categories, is more directly related to episodic memory formation, whereas the second effect, which occurred for high-frequency words only, is related to processes influencing episodic encoding success indirectly.
Metacognition in prospective memory: Are performance predictions accurate?
Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 2011
This study investigated the role of metacognition in event-based prospective memory. The aim of the study was to explore the relation between an item-level prediction (judgments of learning, JOL) and actual performance. The task and JOLs allowed a differentiation of the two components of prospective memory tasks (retrospective vs. prospective). Results revealed that individuals' predictions were (moderately) accurate for delayed JOLs but not for JOLs that had to be given immediately after task encoding. Moreover, data revealed an underconfidence-with-practice effect only for the retrospective component. For the prospective component, a substantial and general level of underconfidence in individuals' prediction-performance ratios was observed. The importance of metacognitive factors for prospective memory is discussed.
Prospective and retrospective metacognitive judgments have been studied extensively in the field of memory; however, their accuracy has not been systematically compared. Such a comparison is important for studying how metacognitive judgments are formed. Here, we present the results of an experiment aiming to investigate the relation between performance in an anagram task and the accuracy of prospective and retrospective confidence judgments. Participants worked on anagrams and were then asked to respond whether a presented word was the solution. They also rated their confidence, either before or after the response and either before or after seeing the suggested solution. The results showed that although response accuracy always correlated with confidence, this relationship was weaker when metacognitive judgements were given before the response. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of this finding for studies on metacognition and consciousness.
Psychological Science, 2020
Did you park near the lake or the water tower when you left to go camping? Monitoring the contents of memory is a critical cognitive function that affects how people prepare for future situations when memories are needed. Lack of confidence may lead to more rehearsal (e.g., that the car is near the lake); greater confidence may lead to no rehearsal at all. Importantly, assessing memory for your car's location immediately after parking may encourage you to rely on different types of information (cues) than assessing it later in the day. Metacognition research examines how different factors influence memory monitoring by having people make judgments of learning (JOLs) prior to a memory test (e.g., judging memory for paired associates, such as lake-car). In the present study, we examined the neurobiological mechanisms that support memory monitoring and how they utilize different information depending on when memory monitoring occurs relative to initial encoding. A critical question in neurobiological-metacognition research has been whether brain regions involved in metacognition differ from those involved in primary cognitive processes, such as long-term memory (e.g., Janowsky, Shimamura, & Squire, 1989; Shimamura & Squire, 1986). Early research on this question has suggested that memory monitoring has both distinct and overlapping regions with those underlying long-term memory. The medial temporal lobes (MTLs) are believed to serve primary memory processes such as encoding 958004P SSXXX10.
Memory for nonoccurrences: The role of metacognition
Journal of Memory and Language, 2003
How do we know that an event did not happen? An intuitively appealing account is that individuals use the perceived memorability of an event, in conjunction with failure to retrieve any information about that event, to infer the eventÕs nonoccurrence: If an event is expected to be remembered, yet no memory for it can be identified, then the event must not have happened. Evidence consistent with this proposal was obtained in two experiments. Experiment 1 showed that correct rejection was affected by item salience (i.e., memorability), and that item salience interacted with a retrieval manipulation intended to differentially influence correct rejection of high-versus low-salience items. Experiment 2 extended these findings by showing age differences in the effect of salience, consistent with the hypothesis that the strategic use of event memorability may develop with age.
Aging, episodic memory feeling-of-knowing, and frontal functioning
Neuropsychology, 2000
Groups of normal old and young adults made episodic memory feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments and took 2 types of episodic memory tests (cued recall and recognition). Neuropsychological tests of executive and memory functions thought to respectively involve the frontal and medial temporal structures were also administered. Age differences were observed on the episodic memory measures and on all neuropsychological tests. Compared with young adults, older adults performed at chance level on FOK accuracy judgments. Partial correlations indicated that a composite measure of frontal functioning and FOK accuracy were closely related. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the composite frontal functioning score accounted for a large proportion of the age-related variance in FOK accuracy. This finding supports the idea that the age-related decline in episodic memory FOK accuracy is mainly the result of executive or frontal limitations associated with aging. Episodic memory is defined as the kind of memory that makes it possible to consciously recollect personal happenings and events from one's past. In this sense, episodic memory refers to the acquisition of prepositional information at a given time and its reproduction at some later time (Wheeler. Stuss, & Tulving, 1997). Standard laboratory recall and recognition tasks are classified as episodic memory tests. Metamemory refers to one's belief about one's own memory efficiency (Flavell, 1979; T. O. Nelson, 1996). One aspect of metamemory is the feeling-of-knowing (FOK), which individuals may be asked to judge by estimating the likelihood that they will subsequently recognize a piece of information they had failed to recall, either from long-term knowledge or semantic memory (Hart, 1965; T. O. Nelson & Narens, 1980), or from recently learned episodic memory information (Schacter, 1983). From such judgments, FOK performance indexes can be computed to operationalize the degree to which FOK judgments match correct and incorrect recognition performance. Evidence suggests that impairment of metamemory is associated with frontal lobe lesions (Shimamura, 1995). Using both a semantic memory FOK procedure and an episodic memory FOK procedure, Shimamura and Squire (1986) examined amnesic patients and Korsakoffs syndrome patients suffering from anterograde amnesia. The two types of patients were equally impaired on recall and recognition tests. However, only Korsakoffs patients exhibited altered episodic memory FOK. These results suggest