Preserved monitoring and control processes in temporal lobe epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to assess an aspect of metamemory never examined before in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE): the ability to upgrade the accuracy of one's memory predictions after study.

METHOD

Four lists of different levels of difficulty and relatedness were presented to 15 TLE patients and 15 control participants, who were asked to predict their subsequent recall both before and after studying each list.

RESULTS

The results showed clear impairment in recall in TLE patients. However, both TLE patients and controls showed an improvement in accuracy in their poststudy predictions compared with their prestudy predictions, showing that both groups were able to upgrade their metamemory predictions. Unexpectedly, prediction accuracy was overall higher in TLE patients than in controls. Moreover, study time was allocated in both groups taking into account the characteristics of the list.

CONCLUSION

These results confirm and extend findings of Howard et al. (2010) of intact metamemory in TLE patients, and provide further support to the dissociation between memory and metamemory in this clinical population.