Metamemory in Schizophrenia: an exploration of the feeling-of-knowing state.

The ability to monitor memory performance has considerable importance in everyday life and is among the proposed metamemory dimensions which has been widely investigated. The ability to monitor memory performance accurately was examined in 16 patients with schizophrenia and 16 control subjects by using a Feeling-of-Knowing task on episodic information. Feeling-of-Knowing judgments are predictions made about the likelihood of subsequent recognition of currently non-recallable information. Participants were given cued recall and recognition tests of 50 sentence-target words. Feeling-of-knowing judgments were made for non-recalled targets. Our results first confirm that schizophrenia is associated with episodic memory impairment. By using the Feeling-of-Knowing task, patients with schizophrenia were found to predict accurately their subsequent recognition performance, suggesting an interesting dissociation between a preserved metamemory and an altered memory.