Beatty W W, Monson N
Clinical Neuroscience Research Program, Neuropsychiatric Research Institute, Fargo, ND.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 1991 Mar;13(2):309-27. doi: 10.1080/01688639108401046.
MS patients and age- and education-matched normal controls were administered several laboratory tests of metamemory and a questionnaire designed to measure subjects' capability to appraise their ability to remember events that might occur in everyday life. On laboratory tasks involving newly acquired information, MS patients with poor recognition memory abilities or poor performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) exhibited impairments on one test of metamemory; patients with deficits in both recognition and on the WCST showed more extensive impairments in metamemory. In contrast to their performance on tests involving newly acquired information, all groups of MS patients predicted their ability to recognize answers to general information questions that they could not recall as accurately as controls, and, like controls, they also searched their memories longer for answers to items that they believed they would recognize. In general, the results support the hypothesis that both trace-access and inferential mechanisms, which are thought to involve the prefrontal cortex, contribute to metamemory, but the nature of the memory task importantly influences the accuracy of metamemory, as well. Results from the questionnaire indicated that many MS patients with demonstrable memory deficits do not acknowledge their memory difficulties. Hence, patient self-reports about memory are likely to be unreliable sources of information for clinical purposes.
对多发性硬化症（MS）患者以及年龄和教育程度相匹配的正常对照组进行了多项元记忆实验室测试，并发放了一份问卷，旨在测量受试者评估自己记忆日常生活中可能发生事件的能力。在涉及新获取信息的实验室任务中，识别记忆能力较差或在威斯康星卡片分类测验（WCST）中表现不佳的MS患者在一项元记忆测试中表现出损伤；在识别和WCST两项测试中均有缺陷的患者在元记忆方面表现出更广泛的损伤。与他们在涉及新获取信息的测试中的表现不同，所有MS患者组预测自己识别一般信息问题答案的能力，而这些问题他们无法像对照组那样准确回忆起来，并且和对照组一样，他们也会为自己认为能识别的问题答案在记忆中搜索更长时间。总体而言，结果支持这样一种假设，即被认为涉及前额叶皮层的痕迹提取和推理机制都对元记忆有贡献，但记忆任务的性质也会对元记忆的准确性产生重要影响。问卷结果表明，许多有明显记忆缺陷的MS患者并不承认自己的记忆困难。因此，患者关于记忆的自我报告可能是临床目的不可靠的信息来源。
