Metamemory
Monitoring and control might be further divided into subprocesses depending on the types of inputs, computations, and outputs required at different stages of the memory process.
[4] Current metamemory researchers acknowledge that an individual's introspections contain both accuracies and distortions and are interested in what this conscious monitoring (even if it is not always accurate) reveals about the memory system.
[10] This finding suggests that the question (cue) and not the actual memory (target) is crucial for making metamemory judgments.
[10] Consequently, this hypothesis implies that judgments regarding metamemory are based on an individual's level of familiarity with the information provided in the cue.
[3] Research by Vigliocco, Antonini, and Garrett (1997) and Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) showed that individuals in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state were able to retrieve partial knowledge (gender) about the unrecalled words, providing strong evidence for the accessibility heuristic.
[12] Finally, competition can be assessed (using top-down neural priming) based on the relevant characteristics of the object at hand.
Little research addresses this kind of judgment; however, evidence suggests that JOLs are at least somewhat accurate at predicting learning rates.
[11] Another example is the cue-only JOL, where the subject must determine the retrievability of the target when only the cue is presented at the time of judgment.
[11] These two types of JOLs differ in their accuracy in predicting future performance, and delayed judgments tend to be more accurate.
FOK judgments can also be made regarding the likelihood of remembering information later on and have proven to give fairly accurate indications of future memory.
[6] An example of FOK is if you can't remember the answer when someone asks you what city you're traveling to, but you feel that you would recognize the name if you saw it on a map of the country.
However, if a person does not consciously remember the context in which he or she learned a particular piece of information and only has the feeling of familiarity towards it, it is called a "know" experience.
[citation needed] The recollection process retrieves memories from one's past and can elicit any number of associations of the prior experience ("remember").
In contrast, the familiarity process does not elicit associations with the memory and there are no contextual details of the prior learning occurrence ("know").
[5] For example, "remember" is affected by variables such as depth of processing, generation effects, the frequency of occurrence, divided attention at learning, and reading silently vs. aloud.
In contrast, "know" is affected by repetition priming, stimulus modality, amount of maintenance rehearsal, and suppression of focal attention.
[5] That is, in the face of the outcome of a situation, people tend to overestimate the quality of their previous knowledge, thus leading the person to a distortion towards the provided information.
One example of a mnemonic is the method of loci, in which the memorizer associates each to be remembered item with a different well-known location.
There is strong evidence suggesting that exceptional performance is acquired, rather than it being a natural ability, and that "ordinary" people can improve their memory drastically with the use of appropriate practice and strategies such as mnemonics.
[33] However it is important to acknowledge that although sometimes these well developed tools increase memorisation capabilities in general, more often than not, mnemonists tend to have one domain they specialise in.
[34] Another example of a mnemonist is Suresh Kumar Sharma, who holds the world record for reciting the most digits of pi (70,030).
[1]: 105 Neurobiological research of metamemory is in its early stages, but recent evidence suggests that the frontal lobe is involved.
A study of patients with medial prefrontal cortex damage showed that feeling-of-knowing judgments and memory confidence were lower than in controls.
Damage to this area is associated with impaired metamemory, especially for weak memory traces and effortful episodic tasks.
[1] Individuals with Korsakoff's syndrome, the result of thiamine deficiency in chronic alcoholics, have damage to the dorsomedial nucleus of the thalamus and the mammillary nuclei, as well as degeneration of the frontal lobes.
[1] However, a later study focusing on HIV found that this impairment was primarily caused by the general fatigue associated with the disease.
[1] Individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy display impaired metamemory for some tasks and not for others, but little research has been conducted in this area.
[47] When studying four-letter nonsense words, persons on benzodiazepine lorazepam displayed impaired episodic short-term memory and lower FOK estimates.
Sudo et al.[49] used DMTS and reported that computational agents controlled by artificial neural networks could evolve metamemory ability.
They reported that the neural network could examine its memories, keep them, and separate outputs without requiring any assistance or intervention by the researchers, suggesting the plausibility of it having metamemory mechanisms.
