Thinking About Memory: How Confident Are You in Your Memory, and Does it Change With Age?
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseNot listed
Trial typeObservational
Biological sexAll
Age65-120
SponsorKing's College London
About this trial
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.
Eligibility criteria
This trial accepts healthy volunteersQualifiers
In age range given above
Referred to memory clinic
No other current psychiatric or neurological disorders, except for migraine
Can understand verbal or written information given in English.
Disqualifiers
Outside age range given above
If they have a diagnosis of dementia and/or inability to provide informed consent.
Diagnosis of other neurological and/ or psychiatric problems.
Healthy participants will be excluded if they have participated in the previous study (King's REC ref: HR/DP-21/22-302230), as this study is a continuation of that.
Trial population
Participants will be identified through the South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS memory clinics, the Joint Dementia research internal database REDCap and the Brain health Clinic at King's College London. Service users who satisfy the inclusion criteria of the study will be identified by clinics and research teams in the respective services and informed about the study. If participants give consent to contact (provided by the services mentioned above), the research team will contact the participants through email and provide further information about the study. Should the participant agree to participate, they will be offered to come to the test lab at King's College London Guy's campus.
Trial design
Design model
Case-control
Time perspective
Cross-sectional
Treatments tested in this trial
Memory tasks
BehavioralNaturalistic Episodic Memory encoding: Participants will play short sessions of 3 board games with the researcher. The board games include Ludo, Snakes \& Ladders and Solitaire. Participants will play each boardgame for around 5 min. They will wear a head camera while playing the games. Later participants will be tested on their memory of the naturalistic episodic memory task, a semantic memory task (memory of facts) and a perceptual task. Each task will consist of 2-3 sub-tasks of around 30 trials. These tasks will all take place on the computer and will take 30-40 minutes in total. In each trial participants will choose between two options. For example: Which of these two images is taken from your head camera? What colour piece did you use in 'snakes and ladders'?. After they choose their answer, they will report how confident they are in their choice. At the end of each task, they will be asked to report how well they think they performed on the task overall.
Treatment groups
72 Participants
are divided into 3 treatment groupsGroup A: Patients Diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment1 intervention
Group B: Participants attending Memory Clinics who do not have diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment1 intervention
Group C: Healthy Control Participants1 intervention
Trial outcomes
Primary outcomes
1
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.
Time frame
Assessed in single 2-3 hour session per participant2
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.
Time frame
Assessed in single 2-3 hour session per participantSecondary outcomes
1
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.
Time frame
Assessed in single 2-3 hour session per participantSponsors and contacts
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Source ClinicalTrials.gov