Postretrieval overconfidence and anosognosia in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD)

General self awareness (anosognosia) and metacognitive monitoring in memory tasks are both impaired in AD, but how they relate to each other is still an open question. We examined awareness with the Anosognosia Questionnaire Dementia (AQD) and monitoring within a memory task, during retrieval with feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and post-retrieval, with judgment-of-confidence (JOC). FOKs/JOCs were performed for names of people either previously linked to self or other. AD showed both impaired FOK and JOC. They also showed lower self metamemory effect in their JOCs and lower awareness of their behavioral functioning in the AQD, which was specifically related to overconfidence in their JOCs for self-related items. Thus, anosognosia and altered postretrieval monitoring for self-related information may be related in AD

Working memory, long-term memory and language processing : issues and future directions

We examined different views of the relationships between working memory, long-term memory and language processing : working memory considered as a gateway between sensory input and long-term memory or rather as a workspace; working memory considered as not strictly tied to any particular cognitive system (and consequently viewed as separated from the language system) or rather as drawing on the operation and storage capacities of a subset of components involved in language processing. It is argued that functional imagery studies (along with neuropsychological researches) could contribute to decide between these conceptions