Evaluation of Metamemory Using a Semantic Construction Strategy in Patients With Schizophrenia

Metamemory measurement

• Objective: Measurement of monitoring and control capabilities, and relations between these two abilities when learning of word pairs.
• Description: The hardware consists of two lists of 30 pairs of French words, each pair of words being composed of a word index and a target word (names of concrete objects). Among the 60 word pairs, 30 are strongly associated items (or easy items, the other 30 being weakly associated or difficult items.

In front of a computer screen, each participant is subjected to a first learning test in which 30 pairs of words appear one by one on the screen. Participants have the option to control the time of presentation of each pair of words. After a retention time of 4 minutes of information devoted to nonverbal distractive task, follows an evaluation phase of deferred judgments of learning (JOL time), where for each pair of words studied, the word index is presented without the target word. Participants must then assess a learning judgment for each pair of words, that is to say they have to estimate, on a 5-point scale, their ability to remember later the target word in the presentation the index word. This JOL (judgments of learning ) assessment phase is immediately followed by cued recall test.

For the second learning test (30 other word pair), the steps are identical. Prior to this second learning, building instruction of a phrase with two words to learn is proposed. Participants are trained on 5 pairs of words. The study concludes with a question phase, during which participants give their impressions of the experience, describe the learning strategies they used and generally consider their ability mnemonic during daily tasks.