Metacognitive monitoring and dementia: how intrinsic and extrinsic cues influence judgments of learning in people with early-stage Alzheimer's disease.

OBJECTIVE The present research compared metamemorial monitoring processes among younger adults, nondemented older adults, and older adults diagnosed with early stage Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type (DAT). METHOD In three experiments we examined the influence of intrinsic and extrinsic cues on Judgment of Learning (JOL) accuracy. Changes in association strength between cue-target word pairs served as the intrinsic manipulation in Experiments 1 and 2. Changes in encoding orientation served as the extrinsic manipulation in Experiment 3. RESULTS Across all experiments we found that young adults, nondemented older adults, and individuals in the early stages of DAT effectively used intrinsic and extrinsic factors to guide JOL predictions. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that while certain aspects of metacognition may be impaired in both the normal and demented older populations, these groups remain able to use theory-based processing, or general knowledge about how memory works, to make metamemory monitoring predictions.