Mild cognitive impairment and feeling-of-knowing in episodic memory

This study examined both retrospective and prospective memory self-monitoring abilities in 33 individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 33 healthy older adult controls. Participants learned 36 critical cue-target word pairs. Following a distractor task, participants were asked to recall each target word that corresponded to a given cue word. Confidence ratings were provided for recalled words. For nonrecalled words, feeling-of-knowing judgments about the likelihood of recognizing the target word on a subsequent recognition test were provided. We found that despite poorer episodic memory performance, the MCI individuals demonstrated accurate retrospective self-monitoring of recalled episodic material. In contrast, the MCI participants were less accurate than controls prospectively self-monitoring their memory for newly learned information. These findings suggest that memory self-monitoring is not a unitary construct and that amnestic MCI participants have difficulty with prospective memory self-monitoring abilities.