Evaluation of Metamemory 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 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 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, generating instruction of a pair of words to learn is proposed: a word index is presented to the participants who have to generate a pair with a target word. Participants are trained on 5 pairs of words.