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.
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