Current findings place cognitive and introspection disturbances at the very heart of schizophrenia. In real life, a person is usually free to choose which aspects of an event to relate, how much detail to volunteer, and what degree of confidence to impart. The decision will depend on a variety of situational and personal goals.

To explore whether patients with schizophrenia are able to achieve a compromise between accuracy and informativeness when reporting information from memory, and pave the way for metamemory-based cognitive remediation.

25 Patients and their healthy matched controls answered general knowledge questions whose answers are numerical first freely, and second through a metamemory-based control. In the second step participants gave their answers with respect to two predefined intervals, one narrow and one large, then made a confidence level judgment for both answers, and had afterwards to select one of the two answers.

Patients were less accurate than healthy participants when reporting information at a self-paced level of precision. However, they benefited remarkably firstly from the framing of the responding, and secondly from the metamemory processes of monitoring and control to improve their memory reporting and to equate healthy subjects' accuracy.

In spite of their memory deficit in the free report, following accurate monitoring, patients strategically regulated the grain size of their memory reporting and proved to be able to manage the competing goals of accuracy and informativeness. These results lead to some optimism regarding the patients' possible adaptation to everyday life situations.