Thinking About Memory: How Confident Are You in Your Memory, and Does it Change With Age?
NCT Number: NCT06539403
Status: RECRUITING
Study Type: OBSERVATIONAL
Conditions: Mild Cognitive Impairment|Subjective Cognitive Decline
Interventions: BEHAVIORAL: Memory tasks
Sponsor: King's College London
Sex: ALL
Age: OLDER_ADULT
Enrollment: 72
Study Design: Observational Model: |Time Perspective: p
Start Date: 2024-02-08
Completion Date: 2025-06-30
Locations: King's College London, London, SE1 1UL, United Kingdom

Summary:
Memory and our own beliefs and confidence in our ability to remember are important for our daily lives. For example, low confidence may hold us back from doing certain tasks, whereas misplaced high confidence in our memories may lead us to false beliefs about what has happened in the past.

However, it is not fully understood how people form their beliefs about their memory abilities. These beliefs we hold about how good our memory is are form of evaluation of our own abilities known as 'metacognition'. The purpose of this study is to better understand how individuals, both with and without diagnosed memory difficulties, perform memory tasks and examine whether their metacognition of their memory performance depends on the type of memory task. That is, the study examines metacognition for different forms of memory; for example memory of our experienced life events as compared to memory for facts. There is still much more to learn about how individuals experience and think about their memories and memory abilities; and understanding this is important as some evidence suggests that good metacognition is associated with better outcomes after diagnosis of cognitive impairment. Understanding metacognitive beliefs about memory could be a route to earlier diagnosis and enable us to identify people who are likely to develop dementia.

Primary Outcome Measures: Do metacognitive judgements of memory performance differ between older healthy individuals and patients who have been referred to memory clinics?, The following will be assessed:

1. How do people rate their own memory overall? Known as self-belief. This is questionnaire in which they rate their own memory on a scale of 1-5; with 1 being 'extremely bad' and 5 being 'extremely good'.
2. How do people rate their ability to complete the tasks? Known as global metacognition. Before and after each task they will rate how good they think they will be, or were, at the task. Also rated on the scale of 1-5.
3. How confident are people in their memory while taking part in a memory task? Known as local metacognition. After each trial of the task, they will answer 'how confident are you that you were correct in that trial?'; again on the same scale of 1-5.

All scales in the primary outcome measure are designed for this set of tasks. The ratings given will be pooled into a level of self-belief; global metacognition and local metacognition for each person. All of which are needed to evaluate the primary outcome measure., Assessed in single 2-3 hour session per participant|Do metacognitive judgements of memory performance vary across different types of cognitive information (e.g., episodic versus semantic) individuals make their confidence judgements on?, The following will be assessed:

1. How confident are people in their memory while taking part in the memory tasks that probe the event they experienced (episodic memory)? After each trial of these tasks, they will answer 'how confident are you that you were correct in that trial?'; again on the same scale of 1-5.
2. How confident are people in their memory while taking part in tasks of general knowledge (semantic memory)? After each trial of the task, they will answer 'how confident are you that you were correct in that trial?'; again on the same scale of 1-5.

These tasks are the same as those referred to in Outcome 1 but this is to indicate that they will also be separately analysed., Assessed in single 2-3 hour session per participant
Secondary Outcome Measures: Are there differences in cognitive performance between those with and without memory complaints?, The secondary outcome consists of the data for task performance itself - rather than confidence ratings described above. That is during the episodic memory tasks and semantic memory tasks they will be either correct or incorrect on each trial and so a proportion of trials correct will be calculated for each memory domain. There are up to 90 trials per domain, so proportion correct is X/90 for each domain., Assessed in single 2-3 hour session per participant