Metamemory monitoring and Parkinson's disease

Feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and global prediction in episodic memory were examined in 16 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 16 elderly control subjects. Subjects were given cued recall and recognition tests of 20 critical cue-target words. Prior to the study phase, participants were asked to predict the number of words they could recall. During the recall phase, they judged their FOK for non-recalled words in terms of how likely they thought they would be able to recognize the key words on a subsequent recognition test. No difference was found in the two groups for global prediction accuracy. However in comparison to the older adults, PD patients exhibit impaired FOK accuracy, suggesting that in some circumstances metamemory may be altered in Parkinson's disease.