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Boosting Familiarity-Based Memory Decisions in Alzheimer’s Disease: The Importance of Metacognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2020

Marie Geurten Open the ORCID record for Marie Geurten [Opens in a new window] ,
Eric Salmon ,
Sylvie Willems  and
Christine Bastin
Marie Geurten*
Affiliation:
GIGA Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Unit, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium National Fund for Scientific Research, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
Eric Salmon
Affiliation:
GIGA Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Unit, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium Memory Center, Department of Neurology, CHU of Liège, Liège, Belgium
Sylvie Willems
Affiliation:
Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Unit, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
Christine Bastin
Affiliation:
GIGA Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Unit, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium National Fund for Scientific Research, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
*
*Correspondence and reprint requests to: Marie Geurten, University of Liège B33 Trifacultaire – Quartier Agora, Place des Orateurs 1, 4000Liège, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Objective:

Recent studies in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have suggested that AD patients are not always able to rely on their feeling of familiarity to improve their memory decisions to the same extent as healthy participants. This underuse of familiarity in AD could result from a learned reinterpretation of fluency as a poor cue for memory that would prevent them to attribute a feeling of fluency to a previous encounter. The primary goal of this study was to determine whether AD patients could relearn the association between processing fluency and past exposure after being repeatedly exposed to situations where using this association improves the accuracy of their memory decisions.

Method:

Thirty-nine patients with probable AD were recruited and asked to complete several recognition tests. During these tests, participants were put either in a condition where the positive contingency between fluent processing and previous encounters with an item was systematically confirmed (intervention condition) or in a condition where there was no correlation between fluency and prior exposure (control condition). The efficacy of the intervention was evaluated at three time points (baseline, posttest, and 3-month follow-up).

Results:

Our results indicated that all AD patients do not benefit to the same extent from the training. Two variables appeared to influence the likelihood that participants increase and maintain their reliance on the fluency cues after the intervention: the ability to detect the fluency manipulation and the preservation of implicit metacognitive skills.

Conclusion:

These findings indicate the importance of metacognition for inferential attribution processes in memory.

Keywords

Neurodegenerative diseasesRecognitionMemoryFluencyMetacognitionTraining
Type
Regular Research
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , March 2021 , pp. 239 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © INS. Published by Cambridge University Press, 2020

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