Metamemory adjustments over time in adults with and without traumatic brain injury

This study explored whether adults with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI) adjust their judgements of learning (JOLs) over the course of a verbal learning task.

Regression analyses were performed of JOLs and recall over time, for both group means and individual performance.

Twenty adults with TBI and 16 healthy controls studied lists of noun-pairs, making Likert scale JOLs for each item during the study phase. Half of the JOLs were made immediately following item study; the other half after several minutes delay. Recall was tested for each list after all JOLs were complete.

Analyses revealed significant differences between participants with TBI and controls in how JOLs changed over time. As a group, TBI survivors increased JOLs over the course of the learning experiment in the delayed condition, whereas the control group decreased JOL predictions in the immediate condition.

These results support previous work showing that metamemory abilities of adults with TBI are heterogeneous, but show some differences from those of healthy adults. Possible explanations are derived from Koriat's findings that, with practice, individuals tend to shift toward basing metamemory predictions on mnemonic cues rather than cues intrinsic to task items.