Metamemory in schizophrenia: Monitoring or control deficit?

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a common mental disease with a lifetime risk of about 1%. It has been closely linked to a wide range of cognitive deficits. In addition to cognitive deficits, patients with schizophrenia also manifest deficits in awareness of their memory capacity. The study of metamemory permits an experimental approach to metacognition in schizophrenia. Two studies with schizophrenia patients are reported. The first study is on FOK, a metamemory judgment that is expressed at the time of retrieval. The second study examines JOL, which is expressed at the time of learning and allows the studying of the strategic regulation of learning. Thus, the relationship between monitoring and control can be revealed. The findings of the two reported studies showed preservation of the accuracy of prospective metamemory judgments in schizophrenia. The first study demonstrated that the accuracy of FOK, the judgments elicited at the time of retrieval regarding the future recallability of unrecalled items, is preserved in an episodic task. Evidence from the second study indicates that the accuracy of judgments elicited at the time of encoding (i.e., JOLs) is also relatively preserved but the strategic regulation (i.e., control) of study time is impaired in schizophrenia. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.