Relations Between Cognitive Complaints and Cognitive Scores Goals in Cancer: Assessment of Metamemory

The relationship between performance from neuropsychological tests and subjective complaints of cancer patients treated with chemotherapy or adjuvant hormone therapy is not clear, many studies have reported no significant correlation between these two measures: the perception of patients' their cognitive deficits is generally increased relative to that which is measured by neuropsychological testing.

The reason for this lack of association found is probably multifactorial. 1) It can be explained in part by methodological limitations in some studies (lack of sensitivity tests, experimental design). 2) psycho-order factors and fatigue are also an explanatory variable in the sense that literature data often show that cognitive complaints are correlated with levels of anxiety and depression and fatigue. 3) Finally, metacognition, often assessed in neurodegenerative diseases or even in normal aging to better understand its impact on cognitive disorders, including memory impairment, and the complaint has never been explored in patients with cancer.

Metacognition is a complex but highly sensitive to measure and understand the patient's complaint and correspondence or disagree with the actual performance concept. Metacognition refers A) metacognitive knowledge, ie knowledge of an individual's own cognitive processes; This is a non-dependent activity during which, upstream of the performance of any task, implement an appropriate strategy, anticipate and plan cognitive steps that would be necessary for its success general knowledge; and B) metacognitive experiences, ie knowledge that is based on a cognitive activity in progress, which allows to monitor and control the task in order to maintain or otherwise modify the cognitive processes involved.

While metacognitive knowledge (A) are assessed by multiple choice questionnaires, metacognitive experiences (B) allow targeted and precise fine measures of correspondence between the prediction performance by the patient himself and his actual performance a mnemonic task (for JOL and FOK Judgment of Learning for Feeling Of Knowing). Studies exploring the effects of age on metamemory usually show a deficit of these metacognitive experiences in normal aging compared to young subjects.

Collected at the time of learning, JOL is a prediction of future performance for information that have just been learned. More specifically, when learning words, the subject must judge its ability to further free recall for each item (quantitative data). This prediction is then compared to the actual memory performance found in the free recall task. This comparison allows to judge the accuracy of the prediction and therefore the accuracy of metamemory judgment.